The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904

My Life

(A PROVINCIAL’S STORY)

I

‘I’m only keeping you on out of respect for your esteemed father,’ the manager told me. ‘Otherwise I’d have sent you flying long ago.’

I replied, ‘You flatter me too much, sir, in supposing I’m capable of flight.’

Then I heard him say ‘Take this gentleman away from here, he’s getting on my nerves.’

Two days later I was dismissed, which meant I’d had nine different jobs since the time I’d reached adulthood – to the great chagrin of my father, the town architect. I had worked in various government departments, but all nine jobs had been exactly the same and involved sitting on my backside, copying, listening to idiotic, cheap remarks and waiting for the sack.

When I arrived at Father’s, he was deep in his armchair and his eyes were closed. His gaunt, wasted face, with that bluish-grey shadow where he shaved (he looked like an elderly Catholic organist), expressed humility and resignation. Without acknowledging my greeting, or opening his eyes, he told me, ‘If my beloved wife, your mother, were alive today, the kind of life you lead would be a constant torment for her. I see the workings of Divine Providence in her untimely death. I’m asking you, you miserable wretch,’ he went on, opening his eyes, ‘to tell me what I should do with you.’

When I was younger, my relatives and friends had known what to do with me: some advised me to volunteer for military service, some told me to get a job in a chemist’s shop, while others said I should work in a telegraph office. But now that I had turned twenty-five (I was even going a little grey at the temples) and had been in the army, had worked in a chemist’s shop and in a telegraph office, it seemed that I had exhausted all earthly possibilities, and so they stopped advising me and merely sighed or shook their heads.

‘Who do you think you are?’ Father continued. ‘At your age young men already have a sound position in life, but just take a look at yourself, you common riff-raff, living off your father!’

As usual, he went on about the young people of today being doomed by their atheism, materialism and inflated opinions of themselves, and about the need to ban amateur theatricals, as they distracted young people from their religion and their duties.

‘Please hear me out,’ I said morosely, fearing the worst from this conversation. ‘What you call “position in society” is nothing but the privileges bestowed by capital and education. But the poor and uneducated earn their living by manual labour and I see no reason why I should be any exception.’

‘When you talk about manual labour you sound so stupid and trite,’ Father said irritably. ‘Can’t you get this into your thick head, you dim-wit, that there’s something besides brute strength inside you. You have the divine spirit, the sacred fire which sets you miles apart from an ass or a reptile and makes you akin to the sublime! The finest people needed thousands of years to produce that fire. General Poloznev, your great-grandfather, fought at Borodino.¹ Your grandfather was a poet, public orator, marshal of the gentry. Your uncle’s a teacher. And lastly, I, your father, am an architect! So all the Poloznevs have preserved this divine fire, only for you to put it out!’

‘Please be fair,’ I said. ‘Millions of people do manual work.’

‘Well, let them! They’re fit for nothing else! Anyone can do manual work, even a downright idiot or criminal. It’s the distinguishing mark of slaves and barbarians, whereas the sacred fire is granted only to the few!’

There was no point in talking any more. Father worshipped himself and could only be convinced by what he himself said. What’s more, I knew very well that his pompous attitude to manual labour was not founded on thoughts of sacred flames so much as on a secret fear that I might become a labourer and thus make myself the talk of the town. However, the main thing was that all my contemporaries had graduated long ago and were doing well, and that the son of the manager of the State Bank was already quite an important civil servant, whereas I, an only son, was a nobody! It was useless continuing this disagreeable conversation, but I sat there feebly protesting in the hope that he would understand what I meant. After all, the problem was simple and clear enough – how was I to earn my living? But simplicity went unnoticed as Father trotted out those sickly phrases about Borodino, the sacred fire, my grandfather – a forgotten poet who wrote bad, meretricious verse at some time. I felt insulted – being called dim-wit and brainless fool was highly insulting. But how I wanted to be understood! In spite of everything I loved my father and sister. My childhood habit of asking them for advice had become so deeply rooted in me that I could never shake it off. Whether I was right or wrong, I was always afraid of upsetting them, afraid that Father was so excited now that his skinny neck had turned red and that he might have a stroke.

‘Sitting in a stuffy room,’ I said, ‘copying, competing with a typewriter, is shameful and insulting for a man of my age. What does all that have to do with sacred flames?’

‘But it’s still brain work,’ Father said. ‘However, that’s enough for now, we must stop this conversation. In any case, I’m warning you: if you don’t go back to the office and if you persist in these contemptible inclinations of yours, then my daughter and I will cast you from our hearts. I’ll disinherit you, I swear to God I will!’

In all sincerity and to demonstrate the unquestionable purity of the motives by which I wished to be guided all my life I replied, ‘The question of my inheritance is of no importance to me. I renounce it in advance.’

Quite contrary to what I was expecting, these words hurt Father deeply. He turned crimson.

‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that, you fool!’ he shouted in a thin, shrill voice. ‘You ignorant lout!’

Swiftly and deftly, in his usual practised way, he slapped me twice in the face. ‘You’re forgetting yourself!’

When Father beat me as a child I had to stand to attention, hands to my sides and look him in the face. And now, whenever he beat me, I would panic completely, stand to attention and try to look him in the face, just as though I were a small child again. Father was old and very thin, but those slender muscles must have been as tough as leather straps, as he really hurt me.

I staggered back into the hall, where he grabbed his umbrella and struck me several times on the head and shoulders. Just then my sister opened the drawing-room door to see what the noise was about, but immediately turned away with a look of horror and pity, without a word in my defence.

I remained unshakeable in my determination not to return to the office, and in my intention to start a new life as a working man. All I had to do was choose a job, and this didn’t seem particularly difficult, since I thought that I was terribly strong, had great stamina and was therefore equal to the most arduous work. A workman’s life lay ahead of me, with all its monotony, hunger, stench and grim surroundings. And there was the constant worry of having enough to live on. Returning from work on Great Dvoryansky Street, I might still envy Dolzhikov the engineer, who worked with his brain. Who knows? But now the thought of these future misfortunes cheered me up. At one time I used to dream of intellectual work, imagining myself as a teacher, doctor or writer, but my dreams never came true. My liking for intellectual pleasures such as the theatre and reading had grown into a passion, but I cannot say whether I had any flair for brain work. At school I had an utter aversion to Greek and I had to be taken out of the fourth form; for a long time I was coached by private tutors who tried to get me into the fifth. Then I worked in different government departments, spending most of the day doing absolutely nothing: this, I was told, constituted brain work. My school and office work called for neither mental effort, nor talent, nor any particular ability or creative energy. It was just mechanical. I consider that type of brain work beneath manual labour. I despise it and do not think that it could justify an idle life of leisure for one minute, since it’s only a sham, another form of idleness. Probably I never knew what real brain work was.

Evening set in. We lived in Great Dvoryansky Street, the town’s main thoroughfare, where our beau monde strolled in the evenings for want of a decent municipal park. This delightful street was a partial substitute for a park, since poplars (particularly sweet-smelling after rain) grew along both sides; acacias, tall lilac bushes, wild cherries and apple trees hung out over fences and railings. The May twilight, the soft green leaves and shadows, the scent of lilac, the droning beetles, the silence, the warmth – spring returns every year, but how fresh, how marvellous everything seemed nonetheless! I would stand by the gate watching the promenaders. I had grown up with most of them and got up to mischief with them when we were children. But they would most likely be startled at the sight of me now, as I was poorly, unfashionably dressed. People called my very narrow trousers and large, clumsy boots ‘macaroni on floats’. Moreover, I had a bad name in that town because I had no social status and frequently played billiards in low pubs. Perhaps another reason was that I’d twice been hauled off to the police station, although I’d done absolutely nothing.

Someone was playing the piano in the engineer Dolzhikov’s flat in the large house opposite. It was growing dark and stars twinkled in the sky. Along came Father with my sister on his arm, wearing that old top-hat with its broad, upturned brim and acknowledging the bows of passers-by as he slowly walked past.

‘Just look!’ he was saying to my sister, pointing at the sky with the same umbrella he had struck me with. ‘Just look at that sky! Even the smallest star is a world of its own! How insignificant is man compared with the universe!’

His tone suggested that he liked being insignificant and found it exceedingly flattering. What a bungler he was! Unfortunately, he was our only architect and not one decent house had been built in the town for the past fifteen or twenty years that I could remember. When he was commissioned to design a house, he usually drew the ballroom and drawing-room first. Just as boarding-school girls, long ago, could dance only if they began from where the stove was, so his creative ideas could only develop by starting from the ballroom and drawing-room. He would add a dining-room, nursery, study – all of them linked by doors. Inevitably, they turned into corridors, each room having two or even three doors too many. He must have had a vague, extremely confused and stunted creative imagination. Always sensing that something was missing, he would resort to different kinds of extensions, lumping one on top of the other. I can still see those narrow entrance-halls, narrow little passages and small, crooked staircases leading onto mezzanines where you could not stand up straight, with three enormous steps instead of a floor, like shelves in a bath-house. And the kitchen was invariably underneath the main house, with vaulted ceilings and brick floors. The façades had a stubborn, harsh look; their lines were stiff, timid, and the roofs were low, squashed-looking. It seemed that the squat, dumpy chimneys just had to be capped with wire cowls and squeaky black weathervanes. The houses that Father built were almost identical – somehow they vaguely put me in mind of his top-hat and the forbidding, rigid lines of the back of his neck. As time passed the town grew used to Father’s ineptitude: it took root and became established as the ruling style.

Father also introduced this style into my sister’s life. To start with, he called her Cleopatra, just as he had called me Misail. When she was a little girl he would scare her by talking about the stars, about the sages of antiquity and our ancestors, explaining the concepts of life and duty in great detail to her. And now that she was twenty-six, he was still at it. Only he was allowed to take her arm when they went for a walk and he somehow imagined that sooner or later a respectable young man would turn up and want to marry her out of respect for his moral virtues. She worshipped Father, was afraid of him and thought him exceptionally clever.

It grew quite dark and the street gradually became deserted. The music died away in the house opposite, gates opened wide and a troika jauntily careered off down the street, its bells softly jingling. The engineer and his daughter had gone for a ride. It was time for bed!

I had my own room in the house, but I lived in a little hut joined onto a brick shed probably built as a harness-room at one time, as large spikes were driven into the walls. But now it was no longer needed for storage and for thirty years Father had been stacking only newspapers there. For some obscure reason he had them bound every six months and would not let anyone touch them. Living in that hut I saw much less of Father and his guests and I felt that if I didn’t have a proper room and didn’t go into the house for dinner every day, that would make Father’s remarks about my being a burden seem less hurtful.

My sister was waiting for me. Without Father’s knowledge, she had brought me supper – a small piece of cold veal and a slice of bread. In our house people were always going on about ‘counting the copecks’ or ‘taking care of the roubles’, and so on. Subjected to all this banal talk, my sister’s only concern was how to save money – and as a result we ate badly. After she put the plate on the table she sat down on the bed and burst into tears.

‘Misail,’ she said, ‘what are you doing to us?’

She did not cover her face; tears trickled on to her breast and arms and she looked most despondent. Then she slumped on to the pillow and gave free rein to her tears, shaking all over and sobbing.

‘That’s another job you’ve left,’ she said. ‘Oh, it’s absolutely terrible!’

‘Please try and understand, my dear sister,’ I said, and her tears filled me with despair.

And as though on purpose, my lamp ran out of paraffin – it was smoking and about to go out. The old spikes on the walls had a sombre look and their shadows flickered.

‘Please spare a thought for us!’ my sister said, getting up. ‘Father is dreadfully upset, I’m not well and nearly going out of my mind. What will become of you?’ she sobbed, holding her hands out. ‘I beg you, I implore you, for our dear mother’s sake, go back to your job!’

‘I can’t, Cleopatra,’ I said, almost giving in. ‘I can’t!’

‘Why not?’ my sister continued. ‘Why not? If you couldn’t get on with your boss you should have found another job. Why don’t you go and work on the railway, for instance? I’ve just been speaking to Anyuta Blagovo and she tells me they’re bound to take you on. She’s even promised to put in a word for you. For heaven’s sake, Misail, think about it! Think about it, I beg you!’

After a little more discussion I gave in. I told her I’d never given much thought to working on the railway and that I’d try it.

She smiled joyfully through her tears, squeezed my hand – and then she started crying again, unable to stop. I went to get some paraffin from the kitchen.

II

No one in that town had greater enthusiasm for amateur theatricals, concerts and tableaux vivants for charity than the Azhogins, who owned a house on Great Dvoryansky Street. They provided the premises for every performance, looked after the organization and took responsibility for all expenses. This rich, landowning family had about eight thousand acres in the district with a splendid manor house, but they had no love for the country and lived in town all year round.

The family consisted of the mother, a tall, thin, refined woman, with short hair, a short blouse and plain skirt in the English style; and three daughters who, instead of being called by their Christian names, were simply known as ‘Eldest’, ‘Middle’ and ‘Youngest’. All three of them had ugly, sharp chins, were shortsighted and round-shouldered. They dressed just like their mother and had an unpleasant lisp. But in spite of this they insisted on taking part in every performance and were always doing charitable work through their acting, reading or singing. They were very earnest, never smiled and even acted – completely lifelessly – in musical comedies with a businesslike look, as though they were book-keepers at work.

I loved our shows, in particular the frequent, somewhat chaotic, noisy rehearsals, after which we were always given supper. I had no part in selecting the plays or casting – my work was backstage. I painted scenery, copied out parts, prompted, helped with the makeup. I was also entrusted with various sound-effects, such as thunder, nightingales’ songs, and so on. As I had no status in society or decent clothes I kept away from everyone at rehearsals, hiding in the darkness of the wings and maintaining a bashful silence.

I painted the scenery – in the Azhogins’ brick shed or out in the yard. I was helped by a house-painter or, as he liked to call himself, ‘decorating contractor’ named Andrey Ivanov. He was about fifty, tall, very thin and pale, with a sunken chest, sunken temples and dark blue patches under his eyes which made him look rather frightening. He suffered from some wasting disease and every spring and autumn people said he was dying, but after a spell in bed he would get up again and declare in a surprised voice ‘So, I’m still here, ain’t I!’

In the town he was called Radish – people said it was his real name. He loved the theatre as much as I did and the moment he heard rumours of a new show he would drop whatever he was doing and go off to the Azhogins’ to paint scenery.

The day after that showdown with my sister I worked from morning to night at the Azhogins’. The rehearsal was due to start at seven p.m., and an hour beforehand all the company assembled in the ballroom; the three sisters, Eldest, Middle and Youngest, walked up and down the stage reading from notebooks. In his long, reddish-brown coat and with a scarf around his neck, Radish stood with his head against the wall, reverently watching the stage. Their mother Mrs Azhogin went up to each of the guests to say something pleasant. She had a way of staring you in the face and speaking softly, as if telling a secret.

‘It must be hard work painting scenery,’ she said softly, coming over to me. ‘I was talking to Madame Mufke about superstitions just now when I saw you come in. Good heavens, I’ve struggled against superstition all my life! To try and convince the servants how stupid their fears are I always light three candles in my room and start any important business matters only on the thirteenth of the month.’

The daughter of Dolzhikov the engineer arrived. She was a pretty, buxom blonde, dressed in ‘Paris fashion’ as they described it in the town. She didn’t do any acting, but they put a chair for her on the stage during rehearsals and the shows didn’t start until she was sitting in the front row, looking radiant and amazing everyone with her dresses. As she came from the capital, she was allowed to pass remarks during rehearsals, which she did with a pleasant, condescending smile, and she obviously thought that our shows were childish games. It was said that she had studied singing at the St Petersburg Conservatoire and had even sung for a winter season in a private opera house. She attracted me very much and at rehearsals or performances I could hardly take my eyes off her.

I had already picked up the notebook for prompting when suddenly my sister appeared. Without taking off her hat and coat she came over to me and said ‘Come with me, please.’

I went. Anyuta Blagovo was standing in the doorway backstage. She also wore a hat, with a dark veil. She was the daughter of the deputy judge who had been serving in our town for some time, almost since the day the local court was first set up. Being tall and well built, she was considered indispensable for tableaux vivants, and when she represented some fairy, or ‘Fame’, her face would burn with shame. But she never took part in the plays, just dropping in at rehearsals on some business or other and never entering the hall. And she had obviously looked in only for a moment now.

‘Father’s been talking about you,’ she said dryly, without looking at me and blushing. ‘Dolzhikov’s promised you a job on the railway. Go and see him tomorrow, he’ll be at home.’

I bowed and thanked her for her trouble.

‘You can leave that,’ she said, pointing to the notebook.

She and my sister went up to Mrs Azhogin and they whispered for a minute or two, looking at me now and again. They were consulting one another about something.

‘Indeed,’ Mrs Azhogin said quietly as she came over to me and stared me in the face, ‘indeed, if this is keeping you from more serious work’ (she took the notebook from me) ‘you can hand it over to someone else. Don’t worry, my dear friend. Off with you now – and good luck.’

I said goodbye and left, feeling rather put out. As I went down the stairs I saw my sister and Anyuta Blagovo hurriedly leaving. They were talking excitedly, most probably about my railway job. My sister never used to come to rehearsals and was probably feeling guilty, afraid that Father might find out that she had been at the Azhogins’ without his permission.

Next day, at about half past twelve, I went to see Dolzhikov. A manservant showed me into a very fine room which the engineer used as drawing-room and office. Here everything was soft, elegant and even rather strange for someone like me, unused to such surroundings. There were expensive carpets, huge armchairs, bronzes, pictures, gilt and plush frames. The photographs all over the walls were of very beautiful women with clever, fine faces, in natural poses. From the drawing-room a door led straight onto a balcony overlooking the garden, where I could see lilac, a table laid for lunch, a great number of bottles and a bunch of roses. It smelt of spring, expensive cigars – the true smell of happiness – and everything seemed to be telling me that this man had really lived, worked hard and attained such happiness as is possible in this world. The engineer’s daughter was sitting at the writing-table reading the paper.

‘Have you come to see Father?’ she asked. ‘He’s having a shower and he’ll be down in a moment. Please take a seat.’

I sat down.

‘You live opposite, don’t you?’ she asked after a brief silence.

‘Yes.’

‘Every day I watch you out of the window, from nothing better to do. I hope it doesn’t bother you,’ she went on, glancing at the newspaper, ‘and I often see you or your sister. She always has such a kind, concentrated expression.’

Dolzhikov came in. He was drying his neck on a towel.

‘Papa, this is Monsieur Poloznev,’ she said.

‘Yes, yes, so Blagovo told me,’ he said, turning briskly towards me without offering his hand. ‘Now listen, what do you want from me? What job do you think I have for you?’

In a loud voice, as if telling me off, he continued, ‘You’re a strange lot! Twenty men come here every day, thinking it’s an office I’m running here! I have a railway to run, gentlemen, and it’s damned hard work. I need mechanics, metal workers, navvies, carpenters, well-sinkers, but all you lot can do is sit on your behinds and scribble! You’re just writers!’

He exuded that same air of prosperity as his carpets and armchairs. Stout, rosy-cheeked, broad-chested, well-washed, he looked just like a china figure of a coachman in his cotton-print shirt and baggy trousers. He had a rounded, curly beard, a hooked nose, and his eyes were dark, clear, innocent. He didn’t have one grey hair on his head.

‘What can you do?’ he went on. ‘Nothing! I’m an engineer and I’m financially secure. But before I was put in charge of this railway I spent years sweating my guts out. I was an engine-driver, then I worked in Belgium for two years as a common greaser. So what work do you think I can give you, young man?’

‘Yes, you’re right, of course,’ I muttered. I was terribly taken aback and could not bear those clear, innocent eyes of his.

‘But you can at least work a telegraph, can’t you?’ he asked after a moment’s thought.

‘Yes, I’ve worked in a telegraph office.’

‘Hm… well, we’ll see. Go to Dubechnya² for the time being. I do have someone there, but he’s a bloody dead loss.’

‘And what will my duties be?’ I asked.

‘We’ll see. Now, off you go for the time being and I’ll see to it. Only don’t start boozing while you’re working for me or come asking for any favours, or you’ll be out on your neck!’

He walked away without even a nod. I bowed to him and his daughter, who was reading the paper, and left. I felt so terribly depressed that when my sister asked what kind of reception I’d had at the engineer’s I just could not speak one word.

Next morning I rose very early, at sunrise, to go to Dubechnya. Great Dvoryansky Street was absolutely deserted – everyone was still in bed – and my footsteps had a hollow, solitary ring. The dew-covered poplars filled the air with their gentle fragrance. I felt sad and reluctant to leave the town. I loved my birthplace, it seemed so beautiful and warm! I loved the greenery, the quiet sunny mornings, the sound of church bells. But the people I had to live with bored me, were like strangers and at times they disgusted me. I neither liked nor understood them. I could not understand what these sixty-five thousand people were living for or how they made ends meet. I knew that Kimry³ earned its living from boots, that Tula⁴ made samovars and rifles, that Odessa was a port. But I had no idea what our town was or what it produced. The people of Great Dvoryansky Street, and two other better-class streets, lived off their capital and civil servants’ salaries that were paid by the government. But how the remaining eight streets that ran parallel for two miles and disappeared behind the hill coped was always an insoluble mystery to me. It embarrasses me to describe how they lived. No public gardens, no theatre, no decent orchestra. Only young Jewish men went into the town and club libraries, so magazines and new books lay uncut for months. Rich, educated people slept in stuffy, cramped bedrooms on wooden beds crawling with bugs, children were kept in disgustingly dirty rooms called nurseries and even old and respected servants slept on the kitchen floor, covered in rags. On fast days the houses reeked of borsch and on others of sturgeon fried in sunflower oil. They ate nasty food and drank unwholesome water. At the town hall, the governor’s, the bishop’s – all over the place – they had been talking for years about the town not having good, cheap water and maintained that two hundred thousand should be borrowed from the government to provide a proper supply. The three dozen or so very rich people in town, who had been known to gamble away whole estates at cards, also drank the bad water and were forever talking excitedly about the loan: this was something I just could not understand. It struck me that it would have been simpler for them to lay out the money from their own pockets.

I did not know one honest man in the whole town. My father took bribes, imagining that he was given them out of respect for his moral virtues. If schoolboys wanted to get into a higher class, they boarded with their teachers, who charged them the earth. At recruiting-time the military commander’s wife took bribes from the young men, even allowing them to buy her a few drinks, and once she was too drunk to get up off her knees in church. The doctors also took bribes at recruiting-time, while the town medical officer and vet levied a tax on butchers’ shops and inns. The local college traded in certificates granting exemption to certain classes; the senior clergy took bribes from the lower and from churchwardens. Anyone making an application at the municipal offices, the citizens’ bureau, the health clinic and any other kind of institution was followed as he left by shouts of ‘Don’t forget to say thank you,’ which meant going back and handing over thirty or forty copecks. And those who didn’t accept bribes – officials from the law department, for example – were arrogant, shook hands with two fingers, and were callous and narrow-minded. They played cards a great deal, drank a lot, and married the rich girls. There was no doubt that they had a harmful, corrupting influence on their surroundings. Only a few young girls gave any hint of moral purity. Most of them had honourable aspirations, were decent and pure of heart. But they had no knowledge of life and believed that bribes were given out of respect for moral virtue. After marrying they let themselves go, aged quickly and were hopelessly swallowed up in the mire of that vulgar, philistine existence.

III

They were building a railway in our district. On Saturday evenings gangs of louts roamed around the town. They were called navvies and the people were scared of them. I often saw one of these brutes, bloody-faced and capless, hauled off to the police station, while material evidence in the form of a samovar or underwear still wet from the washing-line was carried behind. The navvies usually congregated around pubs and markets. They ate, drank and swore and pursued every woman of easy virtue who happened to be passing with piercing whistles. To amuse this starving riff-raff our shopkeepers gave dogs and cats vodka to drink, or tied a paraffin can to a dog’s tail and then whistled, making it tear down the street. Squealing in terror from the can clattering after it, the dog would think some dreadful monster was in hot pursuit and ran way out of town, far into the fields, until it dropped exhausted. And there were some dogs in the town that never stopped trembling, their tails permanently between their legs. People said the joke was too much for them and they had gone mad.

The station was being constructed about three miles from town. The engineers were said to have asked for a bribe of fifty thousand roubles if they brought the line right up to the town. But the council was not prepared to pay more than forty and they fell out over the ten thousand. And now the citizens were sorry, because they had to build a road to the station which, according to estimates, would cost a great deal more. Sleepers and rails had already been laid along the whole line and service trains ran, carrying building materials and workmen. The only delay was with the bridges, which Dolzhikov was building, and one or two unfinished stations.

Dubechnya, as the first station was called, was about eleven miles away. I walked there. As the morning sun caught them, the cornfields shone bright green. The countryside was flat and cheerful round about here, and in the distance the station, hillocks and remote farmsteads were clearly outlined. How good it was to be out in the open country! And how I longed to be saturated by this awareness of freedom – if only for one morning – so that I could forget what was happening in town, forget how hungry and poor I was. Nothing was so off-putting as those sharp pangs of hunger, when loftier notions became strangely intermingled with thoughts of buckwheat porridge, mutton chops and fried fish. There I was standing in the fields looking up at a skylark hovering motionless in the air, hysterically pouring out its song, while all I could think was ‘Some bread and butter would be nice!’ Or I would sit by the roadside with my eyes closed, to rest and to listen to the wonderful sounds of May – when suddenly I’d recall the smell of hot potatoes. In general, for someone so tall and strongly built as myself, I wasn’t getting enough to eat and therefore my overriding sensation during the day was one of hunger. Perhaps it was because of this that I understood so well why many people work just for their daily bread and can talk only of food.

At Dubechnya the inside of the station was being plastered and an upper wooden storey added to the pumping-house. It was hot, there was a smell of slaked lime and the workmen idly wandered around piles of wooden shavings and rubble. A pointsman was sleeping near his hut and the sun beat right into his face. There wasn’t a single tree. The telegraph wires, with hawks perched on them here and there, hummed faintly. Not knowing what to do I wandered among the heaps of rubbish and remembered the engineer’s reply when I asked what my duties would be: ‘… we’ll see’. But what was there to see in this wilderness? The plasterers talked about a foreman and a certain Fedot Vasilyev. It was all foreign to me and I became more and more depressed – a physical depression when you are conscious of your arms, legs and massive body, but when you have no idea what to do with them or where to put them.

After wandering about for at least two hours I noticed some telegraph poles stretching away from the station to the right of the track, stopping by a white stone wall about a mile off. The workmen said that the office was over there and at last I understood that that was where I had to report.

It was a very old, long-abandoned country estate. The spongy stone wall, severely weathered, had collapsed in places. The blind wall of one of the outbuildings – which had a rusty roof patched with shiny bits of tin – faced the open country. Through the gates I could see a spacious yard thick with weeds and an old manor house with sun-blinds in the window and a steep roof red with rust. On each side of the house stood the outbuildings, which were identical. One had its windows boarded up, while the other’s were open. A line of washing hung nearby and some calves were wandering about. The last telegraph pole stood in the yard with a wire leading from it to a window in the outbuilding with the outward-facing blank wall. The door was open and I went in. A man with dark curly hair and a canvas jacket was sitting at a table by the telegraph apparatus. He gave me a stern, sullen look, but immediately smiled and said, ‘Hullo, Better-than-Nothing.’

It was Ivan Cheprakov, an old friend from school who had been expelled from Form Two for smoking. During the autumn we used to catch goldfinches, greenfinches and grosbeaks and sell them in the market early in the morning, while our parents were still asleep. We would lie in wait for flocks of migrant starlings, shooting at them with pellets and then gathering up the wounded. Some of them died in the most terrible torment – to this day I can remember them squeaking at night in the cage in my room. The ones that recuperated were sold and we swore blind that they were males. In the market once I had only one starling left which I had been trying to sell and finally let it go for a mere copeck. ‘Still, it’s better than nothing!’ I said, trying to console myself as I put the copeck in my pocket. From that time street urchins and the boys from school nicknamed me ‘Better-than-Nothing’. Urchins and shopkeepers still teased me with this name, although no one except me could remember its origin.

Cheprakov wasn’t strongly built. He was narrow-chested, round-shouldered and long-legged. His tie was like a piece of string, he had no waistcoat, and his down-at-heel boots were in a worse state than mine. He rarely blinked and always had a look of urgency about him, as though about to grab something.

‘Now, wait a jiff,’ he said, fidgeting. ‘And listen! Now, what was I saying?’

We started talking. I found out that the estate where I now was had been the Cheprakovs’ property until recently, and only last autumn had passed into the hands of Dolzhikov, who thought it more profitable to put his money into land than keep it in cash. Already he had bought three sizeable estates in the district on mortgage. At the sale Cheprakov’s mother had reserved the right to live in one of the outbuildings for two years and had talked them into giving her son a job in the office.

‘It would have surprised me if he hadn’t bought it!’ Cheprakov said, referring to the engineer. ‘He makes so much out of the contractors alone! He fleeces everybody!’

Then he took me off to dinner, having decided, after a great deal of fuss, that I would live with him in the outbuilding and have my meals at his mother’s.

‘She’s very tight-fisted with me,’ he said. ‘But she won’t charge you very much.’

It was very cramped in the small rooms where his mother lived. All of them, even the hall and lobby, were crammed with furniture brought from the big house after the sale of the estate. It was all mahogany and very old-fashioned. Mrs Cheprakov, a very plump, middle-aged woman with slanting Chinese eyes, was sitting in a large armchair at the window knitting a stocking.

She greeted me with great ceremony.

‘Mother, this is Poloznev,’ Cheprakov said, introducing me. ‘He’ll be working here.’

‘Are you a gentleman?’ she asked in a strange, unpleasant voice. I thought I could hear fat gurgling in her throat.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Please sit down.’

It was a poor meal. All we had was sour curd pie and milk soup. Yelena Nikiforovna, our hostess, kept winking strangely, first with one eye, then the other. Although she spoke and ate, there was something deathly about her whole body and she even seemed to smell like a corpse. There was scarcely a flicker of life in her, only the dim consciousness that she was a lady, and a landowner, who had once owned serfs, and that she had been a general’s wife, whom the servants had to call madam. When these pathetic remnants of life briefly flared up she would tell her son, ‘Jean, you’re not holding your knife properly.’

Or she would breathe deeply and tell me, with all the affectedness of a hostess anxious to entertain her guest, ‘As you know, we’ve sold the estate. It’s a pity, of course, we’d grown so used to it. But Dolzhikov has promised to make Jean stationmaster at Dubechnya, so we shan’t be leaving. We’ll live in the station, which is really the same as being on the estate. Such a nice man, that engineer! He’s very handsome, isn’t he?’

Not long before, the Cheprakovs had been living in style, but after the general died everything changed. Mrs Cheprakov started quarrelling with the neighbours and taking people to court. She stopped paying her managers and workmen. She was in perpetual fear of being robbed and in about ten years Dubechnya had become unrecognizable.

Behind the main house was an old garden that had run wild, and it was choked with weeds and bushes. I walked up and down the terrace, which was still firm and beautiful. Through a french window I could see a room with a parquet floor – most probably the drawing-room. The only furniture was an old-fashioned piano and engravings in broad mahogany frames on the walls. All that was left of the flower-beds were peonies and poppies holding their white and bright red heads above the grass. Young maples and elms, gnawed at by cows, grew over the paths, stretching out and crowding one another. The garden was thickly overgrown and seemed impenetrable, but this was only near the house, where there were still poplars, pines and ancient limes, all of the same age and survivors of former avenues. Beyond them, however, the garden had been cleared for mowing hay, and here it was not so damp, one’s mouth and eyes were not attacked by cobwebs, and now and then a gentle breeze stirred. The deeper you went into that garden the more it opened out. Here there were wild cherry and plum trees, wide-spreading apple trees disfigured by props and canker. There were such lofty pear trees that it was hard to believe they really were pear trees. This part of the garden was rented to women traders from the town and it was guarded against thieves and starlings by an idiot peasant who lived in a cottage.

As it gradually thinned out the garden became a real meadow sloping down to a river overgrown with green rushes and osiers. Near the mill-dam was a deep pond full of fish. A small mill with a thatched roof angrily hummed away and frogs croaked furiously. Occasionally the mirror-like surface of the water was broken by ripples, water-lilies trembled as lively fish brushed past them. On the far side of the stream was the hamlet of Dubechnya. The calm blue millpond drew one to it, promising cool and rest. And now all this – the millpond, the mill and the pleasant river banks – belonged to the engineer!

And so I started my new job. I received and despatched telegrams, wrote out expense sheets, made fair copies of order forms, claims and reports that were sent to our office by illiterate foremen and workmen. Most of the day I did nothing but pace the room waiting for telegrams. Or I would make a boy sit there and go out into the garden for a walk until he came running to tell me that the telegraph machine was clicking. I had dinner at Mrs Cheprakov’s. They hardly ever served meat and we usually had nothing but milk dishes; on fast days such as Wednesday and Friday, they brought out the ‘Lenten’ pink plates. Mrs Cheprakov was in the habit of always winking and I felt ill at ease whenever I was with her.

As there wasn’t enough work in the outbuilding, even for one person, Cheprakov slept or went down with his rifle to the millpond to shoot ducks. In the evenings he would get drunk in the village or at the station, and before going to bed would look at himself in the mirror and shout, ‘Hullo, Ivan Cheprakov!’

When drunk he looked very pale, and he kept rubbing his hands and producing a neighing laugh. He would strip and run around the field stark naked for the fun of it. He used to eat flies and said that they had a rather sour taste.

IV

One day, after dinner, he came running breathlessly into the outbuilding and said, ‘You’d better get moving, your sister’s arrived.’

I went out. A cab from the town was standing at the entrance to the main house. My sister had come with Anyuta Blagovo and a gentleman in a military tunic. As I went closer I recognized him as Anyuta’s brother, an army doctor.

‘We’ve come for a picnic!’ he said. ‘I hope it’s all right.’

My sister and Anyuta wanted to ask how I was getting on, but neither spoke and simply stared at me. They could see I didn’t like it there and my sister’s eyes filled with tears, while Anyuta Blagovo blushed. We went into the garden with the doctor leading the way and exclaiming rapturously, ‘What air! My goodness, what air!’

He still looked like a student, he spoke and walked like one, and his grey eyes had the lively, natural, open look of a good student. Next to his tall, beautiful sister he seemed frail and thin. His beard was thin too, as was his pleasant tenor voice. He had been serving somewhere with his regiment and was now home on leave. He said that he was going to St Petersburg in the autumn to sit for his M.D. A family man with a wife and three children, he had married young, when he was a second-year student, and people in the town said he had an unhappy life at home and that he wasn’t living with his wife.

‘What’s the time?’ my sister asked anxiously. ‘We’ll have to be back early. Papa said I could come and see my brother, but only if I’m back by six, without fail.’

‘Oh, blow your Papa!’ the doctor sighed.

I put the samovar on and we drank our tea on a rug in front of the terrace of the big house. The doctor knelt as he drank out of a saucer, saying that it was sheer bliss. Then Cheprakov fetched a key, opened the french window, and we all went into the house. It was gloomy, mysterious and smelt of fungus. Our footsteps had a hollow ring as if there was a cellar under the floor. The doctor stood at the piano and touched the keys, which replied with a weak, tremulous, rather blurred but melodious chord. He tested his voice and sang a song, frowning and impatiently stamping his foot when he touched a dead key. My sister had forgotten about going home, and excitedly paced the room saying, ‘I feel so gay, so very, very gay!’

There was a note of surprise in her voice and it was as if she did not think that she too could be happy. It was the first time I had seen her looking so cheerful. She even looked prettier. In profile she wasn’t very pretty, with protruding nose and mouth, so that she always seemed to be blowing. But she had beautiful, dark eyes, a pale, very delicate complexion and a kind, sad look that was most touching. When she spoke she seemed attractive, beautiful even. Both of us took after our mother – we were broad-shouldered, strong, and with great staying-power – but her pallor was that of a sick person. She was always coughing and sometimes I detected in her eyes the look of a person who was seriously ill but who was somehow trying to hide it. There was something child-like, naïve in her gaiety now, as if the child’s sense of joy that had been crushed and stifled by our strict upbringing had suddenly awakened in her and was struggling to express itself.

But when evening came and the horses were brought round my sister became quiet and seemed to shrink. She sat down in the carriage like a prisoner in the dock.

When they had driven off and everything became quiet, it struck me that Anyuta Blagovo had not spoken one word to me the whole time.

‘An amazing girl!’ I thought. ‘Wonderful!’

St Peter’s Fast arrived and every day we had only Lenten food. Idleness and the uncertainty of my position had brought on a physical depression. Feeling dissatisfied with myself, sluggish and hungry, I lounged around the estate, just waiting until I was in the right mood to leave.

One day, late in the afternoon, when Radish was with us in the outbuilding, Dolzhikov unexpectedly came in, very sunburnt and grey with dust. He had spent three days on his section of the line, had just travelled to Dubechnya on a railway engine and had walked over from the station to see us. While he was waiting for a cab to come from town and collect him, he made a tour of the estate with his manager, giving orders in a loud voice. Then he sat in our building for a whole hour writing letters. While he was there some telegrams came through and he tapped out the answers himself. The three of us stood to attention, not saying a word.

‘What a mess!’ he said, looking disgustedly at the records. ‘In a fortnight’s time I’m transferring the office to the station and I just don’t know what I’m going to do with you.’

‘I’m trying very hard, sir,’ Cheprakov said.

‘I can see how you’re trying. All you can do is draw your wages,’ he continued. ‘Just because you have people to pull strings for you, you think it’s easy to get a quick leg-up. Well, no one gets that from me. No one ever bothered about me. Before I was in charge of the railway I was an engine-driver. I worked in Belgium as an ordinary greaser. Hey, you, Panteley,’ he said, turning to Radish, ‘what are you doing here? Getting drunk with this lot, eh?’

For some reason he called all simple labourers Panteley, while he despised people like myself and Cheprakov, calling us scum and drunken pigs behind our backs. On the whole he was hard on his junior clerks, fined them and coolly gave them the sack without any explanation.

At last his carriage arrived. By way of farewell he promised to sack the lot of us in a fortnight and called his manager a blockhead. Then he sprawled back in his carriage and bowled off to town.

‘Andrey,’ I asked Radish, ‘can I work for you?’

‘Oh, all right.’

And we went off to town together. When the station and manor house were far behind I asked ‘Andrey, why did you come to Dubechnya just now?’

‘Firstly, my lads are working on the line, and secondly I went to pay the general’s widow the interest I owe her. Last year I borrowed fifty roubles and now I’m paying her a rouble a month.’

The painter stopped and caught hold of one of my coat buttons. ‘My dear Misail,’ he went on, ‘the way I see it is this. An ordinary working man or gent who lends money – even at the very lowest rates – is a villain. The truth cannot dwell in him.’

Thin, pale and terrifying, Radish closed his eyes, shook his head and spoke out, in the solemn voice of a sage, ‘Aphids eat grass, rust eats iron – and lies the soul. God save us sinners!’

V

Radish was an impractical person, with no head for business. He took on more work than he could handle, tended to lose his nerve when settling up, and as a result was almost always losing money. He did painting, glazing, wallpapering and even roofing jobs, and I can remember him running around for three days looking for roofers – just because of some miserable little job. He was an excellent workman and sometimes earned as much as ten roubles a day. But for his wish to be boss at all costs, to call himself a contractor, he would have been quite prosperous.

He was paid by the job, while he paid me and the other lads by the day – between seventy copecks and a rouble. When the weather was hot and dry we did different outside jobs, mainly roof painting. I was not used to this kind of work and my feet burnt – I felt I was walking over red-hot flagstones – and when I put my felt boots on my feet were even hotter. But this was only at the beginning; later on I got used to it and everything went as smooth as clockwork.

Now I was living among people who had to do physical work, for whom it was unavoidable and who slaved like carthorses, often without being aware of the moral meaning of work and never using the word ‘work’ in conversation even. Next to them I felt rather like a carthorse myself. I became ever more aware that what I was doing just had to be done, there was no avoiding it, and this made life easier and freed me from all doubts.

At first I found everything new and absorbing, as if I had been reborn. I could sleep on the ground or go barefoot, which was extremely pleasant. I could stand in a crowd of ordinary people without attracting any bad feeling, and when a cabman’s horse fell down in the street I would rush to help pull it up without worrying if my clothes got dirty. Most important, I was earning my own living and wasn’t a burden to anyone.

Painting roofs, particularly when we used our own paint, was considered highly profitable, and so even such good workmen as Radish didn’t turn their noses up at this rough, tedious work. With skinny, purple legs, he looked like a stork in his short trousers as he walked over the roofs, and I would hear him sigh deeply as he wielded his brush ‘Woe, woe unto us sinners!’

He walked over roofs as easily as over the ground. Despite being as pale and sickly as a corpse, he was extraordinarily agile, painting the cupolas and domes of churches just like a young man, without using any scaffolding – only ladders and ropes. It was rather frightening seeing him there, poised aloft, far above the ground, stretching himself to his full height and pronouncing solemnly, on behalf of some person unknown, ‘Aphids eat grass, rust eats iron – and lies the soul!’

At times he would ponder something and answer his own thoughts: ‘Anything’s possible! Anything!’

When I went home from work, everyone sitting on benches near their gates – shop-assistants, errand-boys and their masters – followed me with sneers and abuse. At first this worried me and seemed quite monstrous.

‘Better-than-Nothing!’ I heard from all sides. ‘Got yer paint, botcher!’

No one was so unkind to me as those very people who only recently had themselves been ordinary labourers and earned their living by unskilled labour. When I passed the row of shops, water was ‘accidentally’ thrown over me near the ironmonger’s and once someone even threw a stick at me. A grey-haired old fish merchant once barred my path, eyed me malevolently and said, ‘I’m not sorry for you, you fool! It’s your father I’m sorry for!’

For some reason my friends were embarrassed if they met me. Some looked on me as a crank or a clown, others were sorry for me, while others did not know how to approach me and I found it difficult to make them out. One day I met Anyuta Blagovo in a side-street near Great Dvoryansky Street. I was on my way to work, carrying two long brushes and a bucket of paint. She flushed when she recognized me.

‘Please don’t bow to me in the street,’ she said, in a nervous, stern, trembling voice, without offering to shake hands, and suddenly tears glistened in her eyes. ‘If you really must do this kind of thing, then go ahead, but please try and avoid meeting me in public.’

I had left Great Dvoryansky Street and was living in the suburb of Makarikha with my old nanny Karpovna, a kindly but morose old woman who lived in perpetual fear that something dreadful was about to happen. She was frightened by any kind of dream and even saw evil omens in the bees and wasps that flew into her room. In her opinion my becoming a workman was an evil portent.

‘It’s all up with you!’ she said mournfully, shaking her head. ‘You’re finished!’

Prokofy the butcher, her adopted son, lived with her in that little house. He was a hulking, clumsy fellow of about thirty, with reddish hair and wiry moustache. Whenever we met in the hall he would not speak and would politely give way to me – if he happened to be drunk he would accord me a full military salute. When he dined in the evenings I could hear him grunting and sighing through the wooden plank partition as he polished off one glass of vodka after the other.

‘Ma!’ he would call in a low voice.

‘What is it?’ Karpovna would reply. (She loved her adopted son dearly.) ‘What is it, sonny?’

‘I’m going to do you a favour, Ma. I’ll keep you in your old age, in this vale of tears, and when you die I’ll pay all the funeral expenses. I mean it.’

I would be up before dawn every morning and I went early to bed. We house-painters had good appetites and slept soundly, but for some reason my heart would beat violently at night. I never quarrelled with my workmates. All day long there was an endless torrent of abuse, obscene oaths, and sentiments such as ‘Damn your eyes!’ or ‘Blast your guts!’ were typical. However, we were all good friends. The lads suspected I was some kind of religious fanatic and poked good-humoured fun at me, saying that even my own father had disowned me. Then they would tell me that they seldom showed up at church and that many of them hadn’t been to confession for ten years. They tried to justify this slackness by saying that painters were the black sheep of humanity.

The other men respected me and looked up to me. They were obviously pleased that I didn’t smoke or drink, that I led a quiet, steady life. But they were rather shocked when I didn’t help them steal drying oil or join them when they went to ask customers for tips. Stealing employers’ oil and paint was common practice among painters and decorators and was not considered a crime. Remarkably, even someone as virtuous as Radish always took some whiting and oil after work, and even respectable old men with their own houses in Makarikha weren’t above asking for tips. I would feel angry and ashamed when the lads, at the start or finish of some job, would all go cringing before some little pipsqueak, humbly thanking him for the ten copecks he gave them.

They behaved like sly courtiers to customers and almost every day I was reminded of Shakespeare’s Polonius.

‘Oh, it looks like rain,’ a customer would remark, glancing at the sky.

‘Yes, sir, no doubt about it,’ the painters would agree.

‘On the other hand, those aren’t rain clouds. Perhaps it’s not going to rain.’

‘Oh, no, sir, that’s for sure!’

Behind customers’ backs their attitude was usually ironical – when they saw a gentleman, for example, sitting on his balcony with a newspaper they would remark, ‘Can sit reading his paper all right, but I dare say he’s got nothing to eat.’

I never visited my family. When I returned from work I would often find brief, worried notes from my sister, about Father. One day he’d been unusually pensive over dinner and had eaten nothing. Or he’d fallen down. Or he’d locked himself in his room and had not emerged for a long time. News like this worried me and kept me awake. I even used to walk past our house in Great Dvoryansky Street at night, looking into the dark windows and trying to find out if things were all right at home. On Sundays my sister would visit me, but she did this furtively, pretending she had come to see Nanny, not me. If she came into my room she would invariably look very pale, with tear-stained eyes, and she would immediately start crying.

‘Father will never get over it!’ she said. ‘If something should happen to him, God forbid, it will be on your conscience for the rest of your life. It’s dreadful, Misail! I beg you, turn over a new leaf, for Mother’s sake!’

‘My dear sister,’ I said, ‘how can I turn over a new leaf when I’m convinced that I’m acting according to my conscience? Try and understand that!’

‘I know you’re obeying your conscience, but why can’t you do it differently, without upsetting everyone?’

‘Oh, goodness gracious!’ the old woman would sigh from behind the door. ‘It’s all up with you! There’s trouble brewing, my dears, there’s trouble brewing!’

VI

One Sunday Dr Blagovo paid me an unexpected visit. He was wearing a tunic over his silk shirt and high, patent-leather boots.

‘I’ve come to see you!’ he began, pressing my hand like a student. ‘Every day I hear things about you and I’ve been meaning to come and have a heart-to-heart with you, as they say. It’s deadly boring in this town. They all seem dead and there’s no one you can have a conversation with. God, it’s hot!’ he went on, taking his tunic off, leaving just his silk shirt. ‘My dear chap, please let’s talk!’

I myself felt bored and for a long time had been wanting some other company than house-painters. I was genuinely delighted to see him.

‘Let me begin,’ he said, sitting on my bed, ‘by saying how deeply I feel for you and how deeply I respect the kind of life you’re leading. You’re misunderstood in this town, but there’s no one capable of understanding you here. As you know only too well, with one or two exceptions, they’re all a lot of pig-faced freaks.⁵ Right away, at the picnic, I guessed the kind of person you were. You are a noble, honest person with high principles. I respect you and it’s a great honour to shake you by the hand!’ he continued rapturously. ‘To change your life as drastically and abruptly as you did, you first had to experience a complex emotional crisis. To continue as you are, always true to your convictions, you must try and put your heart and soul into it, day after day, never flagging. And now for a start, tell me if you agree that if you exercised your willpower, effort, all your potential, on something else – on eventually becoming a great scholar or artist – would your life be richer, deeper, more productive, in every respect?’

We kept talking and when we came to the subject of manual labour, I expressed the following opinion: ‘The strong should not enslave the weak, the minority must not be parasites on the majority, or leeches, forever sucking their lifeblood. By that I mean – and without exception – everyone, strong or weak, rich or poor, should play his part in the struggle for existence. In this respect there’s no better leveller than physical work, with everyone being forced to do some.’

‘So you think that absolutely everyone must do physical work?’ asked the doctor.

‘Yes.’

‘All right, but supposing everyone, including the cream of humanity – the thinkers and great scholars – played his part in the struggle for existence and wasted his time breaking stones or painting roofs. Wouldn’t that be a serious threat to progress?’

‘But where’s the danger?’ I asked. ‘Surely progress is all about good deeds and obeying the moral law. If you don’t enslave anyone, if you aren’t a burden to anyone, what more progress do you need?’

‘Look here!’ Blagovo said, suddenly flying into a rage and leaping to his feet. ‘Really! If a snail in its shell passes its time trying to perfect itself, messing around with moral laws – would you call that progress?’

‘Why messing around?’ I said, taking offence. ‘If you stop compelling your neighbour to feed, clothe you, to transport you from place to place, to protect you from your enemies, isn’t that progress, in the context of a life founded on slavery? In my opinion, that’s progress and perhaps the only kind possible for man, the only kind that is really necessary.’

‘There’s no limit to the progress that man can make, and this applies all over the world. Any talk of “possible” progress, limited by our needs or short-term considerations, is strange, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘If progress has no limits, as you put it, then its aims are bound to be vague,’ I said. ‘Imagine living without knowing what for!’

‘All right! But this “not knowing” isn’t as boring as your “knowing”. I climb a ladder called progress, civilization, culture. I keep climbing, not knowing precisely where I’m going, but in fact this wonderful ladder alone makes life worth living. But you know why you are living – so that some people stop enslaving others, so that the artist and the man who mixes his colours both have the same food to eat. But this vulgar, sordid, grey side of life – aren’t you revolted, living for that alone? If some insects enslave others, then to hell with them! Let them gobble each other up! But it’s not them we should be talking about; they will die and rot anyway, however hard you try to save them from slavery. The Great Unknown which awaits all mankind in the remote future – that’s what we should be thinking about.’

Blagovo argued heatedly, but I could see that something else was worrying him. ‘I don’t think your sister’s coming,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘When she was with us yesterday she said she’d come out here to see you. You keep on and on about slavery…’ he continued. ‘But that’s a particular case, isn’t it, and mankind solves such problems gradually, as it goes along.’

We talked about gradual development. I said, ‘The question whether to do good or evil is decided by each person by himself, without waiting for mankind to solve the problem gradually. What’s more, gradual development cuts two ways. Side by side with the gradual development of humane ideas we can observe the gradual growth of quite different ideas. Serfdom has been abolished,⁶ but capitalism flourishes. Notions of freedom are all the rage now, but the majority still feeds, clothes and defends the minority, just as in the times of the Tatars, while it starves, goes naked and unprotected itself. This state of affairs fits in beautifully with any trend or current of opinion you like, since the art of enslavement is also being gradually refined. We don’t flog our servants in the stables any more, but we develop refined forms of slavery – at least, we are very good at finding justification for it in isolated instances. Ideas are all right, but if now, at the end of the nineteenth century, it became possible for us to lumber working men with all our more unpleasant bodily functions, then lumber them we would. And then of course we would try and justify ourselves by saying that if the élite – the thinkers and great scholars – wasted their priceless time on these functions, then progress would be seriously jeopardized.’

Just then my sister arrived. Seeing the doctor, she fidgeted nervously, grew flustered and immediately said it was time to go home to Father.

‘Now, Cleopatra,’ Blagovo urged her, pressing both hands to his heart. ‘What can possibly happen to your dear Papa if you stay just half an hour with me and your brother?’

He was quite open with us and was able to infect others with his high spirits. After a moment’s deliberation my sister burst out laughing and suddenly cheered up, as she had done on the picnic. We went out into the fields, lay down on the grass and continued our conversation, looking at the town, where every window facing west seemed to have turned bright gold from the setting sun.

Every time my sister subsequently came to see me, Blagovo would turn up, and they greeted each other as if they had met accidentally in my room. As I argued with the doctor, my sister would listen, and her face would take on an ecstatic, deeply affected, inquisitive look. I had the impression that another world was gradually opening up before her, one that she had never even dreamt of and whose meaning she was now trying to fathom. Without the doctor there she was quiet and sad, and if she sometimes cried when she sat on my bed she never told me the reason.

In August Radish ordered us to leave for the railway line. Two days before we had received the command to ‘get going’ out of that town. Father came to see me. He sat down and wiped his red face without hurrying or looking at me. Then he took a local Herald out of his pocket and proceeded to read slowly, emphasizing every word, about how someone – the same age as me – the son of the manager of the State Bank, had been appointed departmental director in a provincial revenue office.

‘Just look at yourself now!’ he said, folding the paper. ‘Beggar! Tramp! Ruffian! Even the working classes and peasants are educated, so they can take their place in life. And you, a Poloznev, for all your distinguished, noble ancestors, are heading straight for the rubbish dump. But I didn’t come here to talk to you. I’ve already given you up as a bad job,’ he went on in a subdued voice as he stood up. ‘I’ve come to find out where your sister is, you scoundrel. She left the house after dinner, it’s getting on for eight and she’s still not back. She’s started going out fairly often now without telling me. She hasn’t the same respect for me – there I can see your evil, rotten influence. Where is she?’

He was holding that umbrella I knew so well and I was at my wits’ end. Expecting a beating, I stood to attention. But he saw me glance at the umbrella and this probably put him off.

‘Do what you like!’ he said. ‘You won’t have my blessing!’

‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ Nanny muttered behind the door. ‘You poor, stupid wretch. I feel deep down that there’s trouble brewing. I can feel it!’

I started work on the railway line. For the whole of August it rained non-stop and it was damp and cold. They could not get the crops in from the fields, and on the big farms, where they used harvesting-machines, the wheat was lying in heaps instead of sheaves – I can remember those miserable heaps growing darker with every day that passed, the wheat germinating in them. It was hard to do any sort of work. The heavy rain ruined everything we tried to do. We weren’t allowed to live or sleep in the station buildings, so we took shelter in filthy, damp dug-outs where the navvies had lived during the summer, and I could not sleep at night for the cold and the woodlice crawling across my face and arms. When we were working near the bridges, a whole gang of navvies turned up in the evenings just to give the painters a thrashing – this was a form of sport for them. They beat us, stole our brushes and – to provoke us to a fight – they smeared the railway huts with green paint. To cap it all, Radish started paying us extremely irregularly. All the painting in this section was handed over to some contractor who passed it on to someone else, who handed it on to Radish for a twenty per cent commission. We weren’t paid much for the work – and there was that incessant rain. Time was wasted, we were unable to work, but Radish was obliged to pay the men daily. The hungry painters came near to beating him up, called him a swindler, bloodsucker, Judas, while the poor man sighed, held up his hands to heaven in desperation and went time and again to Mrs Cheprakov for money.

VII

A rainy, muddy, dark autumn set in. There was no work around and I would sit at home for days on end without anything to do. Or I would take on different jobs not connected with painting – shifting earth for foundations and getting twenty copecks a day for it. Dr Blagovo had gone to St Petersburg, my sister did not come any more, Radish was at home ill in bed, expecting to die any day.

And the general mood was autumnal. Perhaps it was because I was a working man now that I saw only the seamy side of town life and therefore I could not avoid making discoveries nearly every day that drove me to despair. My fellow citizens, of whom I already had a low opinion, or who appeared to be perfectly decent, now turned out to be contemptible, cruel people, capable of the meanest trick. They swindled simple working men like us, cheated us out of our money, made us wait hours on end in freezing entrance-halls or kitchens, insulted us and treated us very roughly. During the autumn I papered the reading-room and two other rooms at the club. I was paid seven copecks a roll, but I was told to sign for twelve, and when I refused, a handsome gentleman with gold-rimmed spectacles (most probably one of the senior members) told me, ‘Just one more word from you and I’ll bash your face in, you swine!’

And when a waiter whispered to him that I was the son of Poloznev the architect, he blushed with embarrassment, but immediately recovered and said ‘To hell with him!’

At the local shops we workmen were fobbed off with rotten meat, stale flour and weak tea. In church we were shoved around by the police; in hospital we were robbed by junior staff and nurses, and if we didn’t have the money to bribe them with, they took revenge by giving us our food on filthy plates. The most junior post office clerk thought he had the right to address us as if we were animals, yelling roughly and insolently: ‘Hey, you there, wait! Where do you think you’re going?’ Even house dogs were hostile and attacked us particularly viciously. However, what startled me more than anything in my new job was the complete lack of fair play – precisely what the common people mean when they say that someone has become a ‘lost soul’. Hardly a day passed without some kind of swindle. The merchants who sold us mixing oils, the main contractors, workmen, even customers – they all tried it on. Of course, there was no question of our having any rights, and we always had to beg for the money we had earned as we stood cap in hand at the back door.

I was papering one of the rooms next to the club reading-room. One evening as I was about to leave, the engineer Dolzhikov’s daughter came in carrying a pile of books. I bowed.

‘Oh, hullo!’ she said, immediately recognizing me and holding out her hand. ‘So glad to see you.’

She smiled and gave my smock, bucket of paste, the rolls of paper scattered over the floor an inquisitive, puzzled look. I was embarrassed and she felt the same.

‘Please forgive me for staring at you,’ she said. ‘People have told me so much about you, especially Dr Blagovo. He’s simply crazy about you. And I’ve met your sister. She’s a charming, likeable girl, but I was unable to convince her that there’s nothing terrible about the simple life you’re leading. On the contrary, you’re the most fascinating man in town now.’

She glanced once again at the bucket of paste and the wallpaper and went on: ‘I’ve asked Dr Blagovo to help us to get to know each other better, but he’s obviously forgotten or was too busy. At any rate, we already know each other and I’d be extremely obliged if you dropped in to see me some time. I’m really longing to have a talk with you! I’m a straightforward sort of person,’ she continued, holding out her hand to me, ‘and I hope you won’t feel shy at my place. Father’s away in St Petersburg.’

Her dress rustled as she entered the reading-room. It took me a long time to get to sleep after I was home.

During that gloomy autumn some kind soul, who obviously wanted to make my life a little easier, sent me tea, lemons, cakes and roast grouse from time to time. Karpovna said that a soldier always brought the food, but she didn’t know who the sender was. The soldier would ask if I was well, if I had a hot meal every day and if I had warm clothes. When the frosts set in, the soldier came over as before, while I was out, with a soft woollen scarf. It had a delicate, very faint smell of perfume and I guessed who my good fairy was. The perfume was lily-of-the-valley, Anyuta Blagovo’s favourite.

Towards winter there was more work about and everything cheered up. Radish recovered once more and together we worked in the cemetery chapel, cleaning the iconostasis and scraping it with palette knives before the gilding. It was clean, relaxing work – money for jam, as the lads put it. In one day we could get through a lot of work and besides that the time flew past imperceptibly. There was no swearing, laughter or noisy conversation. The very place encouraged us to be quiet and well-behaved and inspired us with calm, serious thoughts. Immersed in our work, we would stand or sit, as motionless as statues. There was the deathly silence befitting a cemetery and if someone dropped his tool or if the icon-lamp sputtered there was a sharp, resonant, echoing sound, which made us all look round. After a long silence we would hear a humming, just like a swarm of bees – they were reading burial prayers at the porch for an infant, in unhurried, hushed voices. Or the artist who was painting a dove surrounded by stars on a cupola would start softly whistling, then suddenly stop, remembering where he was. Or Radish would answer his own thoughts and sigh ‘Anything’s possible! Anything!’ Or bells would toll slowly and mournfully above our heads and the painters would say that they must be burying some rich man.

I spent the days in that silence, in the church twilight, and on long evenings played billards or sat in the theatre gallery wearing the new woollen suit that I had bought with my wages. The performances and concerts had already started at the Azhogins’. Radish painted the scenery by himself now. He told me the plots of the plays and tableaux vivants which he had managed to see at the Azhogins’, and I listened enviously. I had a strong urge to go to rehearsals, but I could not bring myself to go to the Azhogins’.

Dr Blagovo arrived a week before Christmas. Once again we argued and in the evenings we played billiards. During the games he would take off his jacket, unbutton his shirt at the front, and for some reason he was always trying to look like some inveterate rake. He did not drink very much, but became very rowdy when he did have a drop, managing to part with twenty roubles in an evening in a low pub like the Volga.

Once again my sister began visiting me. Both she and the doctor seemed surprised every time they happened to meet, but it was obvious from her joyful, guilty face that these meetings were not accidental. One evening the doctor asked me, when we were playing billiards, ‘Listen, why don’t you call on Mariya Viktorovna? You don’t know how clever and charming she is, such a simple, kind soul.’

I told him about the reception I had got from her father in the spring.

‘But it’s stupid to talk like that!’ the doctor laughed. ‘There’s a world of difference between the father and her! Now, my dear boy, don’t offend her, try and call on her some time. What if we both went along tomorrow evening, together? Would you like that?’

He persuaded me. The following evening I put on my new woollen suit and set off, full of apprehension, to see Mariya Viktorovna. The footman didn’t seem so snooty and intimidating as before, nor did the furniture look so luxurious as on that morning when I came to ask for a job. Mariya Viktorovna was expecting me and welcomed me like an old friend, shaking my hand firmly and warmly. She was wearing a grey, full-sleeved dress and her hair was done in the style that was called ‘dogs’ ears’ a year later, when it became fashionable in town: it was combed back from the temple, over the ears, which made her face seem broader, and on this occasion she struck me as very like her father, who had a broad red face and an expression rather like a coachman’s. She looked beautiful and elegant, but not young – about thirty perhaps, although she was in fact no more than twenty-five.

‘That dear doctor, I’m so grateful to him!’ she said, asking me to sit down. ‘You wouldn’t have come to see me if it hadn’t been for him. I’m bored to death! Father’s gone away and left me alone, and I don’t know what to do with myself in this town.’

Then she began questioning me as to where I was working, what my wages were, where I lived.

‘Do you earn enough to live on?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You lucky man!’ she sighed. ‘I think all the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, from nothing to exercise your mind on, and that’s inevitable when you’re used to living off others. Please don’t get the idea that I’m just trying to impress. I mean this sincerely. It’s not very interesting or pleasant being rich. They say “Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness”⁷ because there’s no such thing as honest wealth and there never can be.’

She gave the furniture a cold, serious look as if she wanted to make an inventory. Then she went on, ‘Comfort and luxury have a magical power. They gradually drag even strong-willed people down. Father and I once lived modestly and simply, but now take a look. It’s just unheard of. We get through twenty thousand a year,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘In the provinces!’

‘Comforts and luxuries should be viewed as the inevitable privilege of capital and education,’ I said, ‘and it strikes me that the comforts of life can be combined with any type of work, even the hardest and dirtiest. Your father is rich, but he himself says that he once had to work as an engine-driver and ordinary greaser.’

She smiled and sceptically shook her head. ‘Papa sometimes eats bread soaked in kvass too,’ she said. ‘It’s just a whim of his!’

At that moment the doorbell rang and she stood up.

‘Educated and rich people should work like everyone else,’ she went on, ‘and everyone should be able to share in the creature comforts. There shouldn’t be any privileges. Well, that’s enough of the theorizing. Tell me something to cheer me up. Tell me about the house-painters. What are they like? Funny?’

The doctor came in. I started telling them all about the painters, but I was short of conversational practice. This had an inhibiting effect and I talked in the earnest dull voice of an ethnographer. The doctor told some stories too, about workmen’s lives. He staggered, wept, knelt and even lay down on the floor to imitate a drunkard. It was an excellent piece of mimicry and Mariya Viktorovna watched him and laughed until the tears came. Then he played the piano and sang in his pleasant, slight tenor voice while Mariya Viktorovna stood nearby choosing the songs and correcting him when he made a mistake.

‘I’ve heard that you sing as well,’ I said.

‘Yes, she sings “as well”!’ the doctor said, horrified. ‘She’s wonderful, a true artist. And you say she sings “as well”. Really, that’s a bit much!’

‘I used to study it once quite seriously,’ she answered, ‘but I’ve given it up now.’

Sitting on a low stool, she told us about her life in St Petersburg and imitated some well-known singers, mimicking their voices and styles. She made a sketch of the doctor in her album and then me. Although she was poor at drawing, she produced good likenesses of us both. She laughed, grew mischievous, pulled faces most charmingly. This suited her better than all her talk of ill-gotten gains. I felt that she had not really meant what she had just said about wealth and comfort, that it was all a kind of masquerade. She was an excellent comic actress. I pictured her next to the young ladies from the town, and even the beautiful, majestic Anyuta Blagovo didn’t bear comparison with her. The difference was enormous – like that between a fine, cultivated rose and a wild one.

The three of us had supper together. The doctor and Mariya Viktorovna drank red wine, champagne and then coffee with brandy. They clinked glasses and drank to friendship, intellect, progress, freedom. They didn’t get drunk, only went red in the face, and they kept laughing at nothing until the tears flowed. As I didn’t want to appear a wet blanket, I drank some red wine too.

‘Extremely clever, richly gifted people,’ Mariya Viktorovna said, ‘know how to live and they go their own way. But average people, like myself, for example, know nothing and can’t do anything on their own. All that’s left for them is to take note of important social trends and swim along with the tide.’

‘But you can’t take note of what doesn’t exist, can you?’ the doctor asked.

‘Doesn’t exist? We only say that because we can’t actually see it.’

‘Really? Social trends are an invention of modern literature. We don’t have any such trends.’

And an argument started.

‘We don’t have any profound social currents and we never did,’ the doctor said in a loud voice. ‘There’s just no limit to what this modern literature has invented. It’s even thought up these intellectual tillers of the soil, but search any village around here – all you’ll find is country bumpkins in their jackets or black frock-coats who can’t even write a three-letter word without making four mistakes. In this land of ours cultural life hasn’t even begun. There’s that same savagery, that same out-and-out boorishness, that same mediocrity that existed five hundred years ago. These trends and currents are a load of piffling, pitiful trash – they’re all bound up with lousy little interests! How can you possibly see anything worthwhile in them? If you think you’ve spotted some important social trend and follow it and devote your life to the latest rage – say freeing insects from slavery, or abstaining from beef rissoles – then I must congratulate you, madam. We must study and study. But as for significant social trends, we’re not mature enough for them yet and, to be honest, we understand nothing about them.’

‘You don’t understand, but I do,’ Mariya Viktorovna said. ‘Heavens, you’re so dreadfully boring this evening!’

‘Our job is to study, to try and accumulate as much knowledge as we can, since important social trends are to be found together with knowledge. The future happiness of mankind will proceed from knowledge alone. I drink to learning!’

‘One thing is certain: we must reorganize our lives somehow,’ Mariya Viktorovna said after a pause for thought. ‘Up to now life hasn’t been worth living. Let’s not talk about it.’

When we left her the cathedral clock was already striking two.

‘Did you like her?’ the doctor asked. ‘She’s wonderful, isn’t she?’

On Christmas Day we dined at Mariya Viktorovna’s and we visited her almost every day during the holidays. We were the only visitors and she was right when she said that she knew no one in town besides myself and the doctor. We spent most of the time in long conversations. Sometimes the doctor brought a book or magazine, from which he read aloud to us. He was in fact the first educated man whom I had met. I’m not qualified to judge how much he knew, but he always let others into what he knew, as he wanted them to benefit from it. When it came to medicine, he was quite unlike any of our town doctors and what he said struck me as novel, something special. I felt that he could have become a real scholar had he wished. And he was perhaps the only man who had any serious influence on me at this time. After our frequent meetings and reading the books he gave me, I felt more and more the need for knowledge that might breathe life into my cheerless labours. Now it seemed strange that I hadn’t known before that the whole world consisted of sixty elements, for example, or what oils or paint were made from, and that somehow I had got by without knowing these things. My friendship with the doctor uplifted me morally too. We often argued, and although I usually stuck to my opinions, it was thanks to him that I gradually became aware I just didn’t understand everything, and I tried to devise the most stringent moral guidelines, so that my conscience would not be clouded or muddled.

For all that, the doctor, the most educated, the best man in the whole town, was far from perfect. In his manners, in his readiness to argue, in his pleasant tenor voice – even in his friendliness – there was something rather crude and bumptious. Whenever he took his coat off and walked around in his silk shirt, or when he tipped a waiter at a restaurant, I always had the impression that there was something of the barbarian in him, despite his being a cultured man.

One morning, towards Epiphany, he returned to St Petersburg. After dinner my sister came to see me. Without taking off her fur coat or hat she sat silently, very pale, staring at something. She had the shivers and I could see she was fighting against it.

‘You must have caught a cold,’ I said.

Her eyes filled with tears. She stood up and went over to Karpovna without a word to me, as if I had offended her. Shortly afterwards I heard her bitterly complaining voice: ‘Nanny, what have I been living for up to now? What for? Tell me, I’ve wasted my youth, haven’t I? The best years of my life have been spent keeping accounts, pouring tea, counting copecks, entertaining guests, in the conviction that there was nothing better! Please understand, Nanny, I have spiritual needs like anyone else and I want to lead a full life. But all they’ve done is turn me into a kind of housekeeper! Don’t you think that’s dreadful?’

She flung the keys through the doorway and they fell clattering to the floor in my room. They were the keys to the sideboard, kitchen cupboard, cellar and china cabinet – keys that Mother had once carried.

‘Oh dear, oh dear me!’ the old woman said in horror. ‘Saints above!’

As she left, my sister came into my room to pick up the keys.

‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘Something strange has been happening to me recently.’

VIII

One day, in the late evening, I came home from Mariya Viktorovna’s to find a young police officer in a new uniform sitting at my table looking through a book.

‘At last!’ he said, standing up and stretching himself. ‘This is the third time I’ve been. The Governor has ordered you to report to him at precisely nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Without fail.’

After taking a signed statement from me that I would do exactly what the Governor had ordered, he left. The police officer’s late visit, plus the unexpected invitation to the Governor’s, utterly depressed me. Since early childhood I have always been scared of gendarmes, policemen and court officials, and now I was worried stiff that I might really have committed some crime. I just could not sleep. Nanny and Prokofy were upset too and they couldn’t sleep either. And Nanny had earache as well. She kept groaning, and several times she started crying from the pain. Hearing that I was awake, Prokofy gingerly entered my room with a lamp and sat down at the table.

‘You should drink some pepper-brandy,’ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘A drink won’t never do you harm in this vale of tears. And if Nanny had a drop of that stuff in her ear it would do her the world of good.’

After two o’clock he prepared to leave for the slaughterhouse to fetch some meat. I knew that I wouldn’t sleep before morning, so I went with him to kill the time until nine o’clock. We took a lamp with us. Prokofy’s assistant Nikolka, a thirteen-year-old boy with blue patches on his face from frostbite – a real bandit from the look of him – urged on his horse in a husky voice as he followed us in a sledge.

‘Like as not you’ll be punished at the Governor’s,’ Prokofy told me on the way. ‘Governors, archimandrites, officers, doctors – every calling has its own proper way of doing things. But you don’t fall into line at all, you won’t get away with that.’

The slaughterhouse was beyond the cemetery and up to now I’d only seen it from the distance. It consisted of three gloomy sheds surrounded by a grey fence, and they gave off a suffocating stench when the wind blew from their direction on hot summer days. But it was so dark as we went into the yard we couldn’t see them. I kept meeting horses and sledges – either empty or laden with meat. Men were walking around with lamps, cursing and swearing obscenely. Prokofy and Nikolka swore just as badly, and the incessant sound of abuse, coughing and the neighing of horses filled the air.

There was a smell of carcases and dung. It was thawing and snow mingled with the mud – in the darkness I felt I was walking over pools of blood.

When our sledge was fully laden we went off to the butcher’s stall in the market. Day was breaking. Cooks with baskets and elderly women in cloaks passed by, one after the other. Cleaver in hand and wearing a blood-stained white apron, Prokofy swore terribly, crossed himself in the direction of the church and shouted all over the market that he was selling his meat at cost price, at a loss even. He gave short weight and short change. Despite seeing this, the cooks were so deafened by his shouting that they offered no protest, apart from calling him swindler and crook. Raising and bringing down that fearful cleaver with a fierce ‘Ugh!’ every time, he assumed picturesque poses. I was scared that he really might chop off someone’s head or hand.

I spent the whole morning at the butcher’s and when I finally went to the Governor’s my fur coat smelt of meat and blood. I felt that someone had ordered me to go and attack a bear with a spear. I remember that steep staircase with its striped carpet and the young clerk in coat and tails with bright buttons silently pointing towards a door with both hands and then dashing off to announce me. I entered the hall, which was luxurious but cold, and tastelessly furnished. The narrow wall mirrors and bright yellow curtains were particular eyesores. I could see that governors might come and go, but the furnishings stayed the same for ever. The young clerk again pointed at the door with both hands and I went over to a large green table, behind which stood a general with the Order of Vladimir round his neck.

‘Mr Poloznev, I asked you to report to me,’ he began, holding some letter and opening his mouth wide, like the letter ‘O’. ‘I asked you to come here so that I can inform you of the following. Your dear respected father has applied both orally and in writing to the Provincial Marshal of the Nobility, requesting him to summon you and make quite clear to you the absolute incompatibility of your behaviour with the title of gentleman, to which class you have the honour to belong. His Excellency Alexander Pavlovich, rightly assuming that your behaviour might lead others into temptation, and finding that mere persuasion on his part might be insufficient and that it was a clearcut case for serious intervention on the part of the authorities, has conveyed his opinion of you in this letter. That opinion I happen to share.’

He said all this softly, respectfully, standing upright as though I were his superior. And there was nothing at all severe in the way he looked at me. His face was flabby, worn, and covered with wrinkles, with bags under the eyes. He dyed his hair and it was impossible to guess his age by looking at him – he could have been forty or sixty.

‘I hope,’ he went on, ‘that you appreciate the tact of honourable Alexander Pavlovich in approaching me privately and not through official channels. I also invited you unofficially and I’m not talking to you as Governor but as a sincere admirer of your father. So, I’m asking you. Either mend your ways and return to those responsibilities befitting your rank. Failing that, to keep yourself out of trouble, go and live somewhere else, where you’re not known and where you can do what you like. Otherwise I shall be compelled to take extreme measures.’

He stood surveying me in silence for about thirty seconds, his mouth wide open. ‘Are you a vegetarian?’⁸ he asked.

‘No, sir, I eat meat.’

He sat down and reached for some document. I bowed and left.

It wasn’t worth going to work before dinner and I went back home to sleep, but I was unable to because of the unpleasant feelings aroused by the slaughterhouse and the conversation with the Governor. I waited until evening and then went off to Mariya Viktorovna’s in a gloomy, troubled frame of mind. I told her that I had been to the Governor’s and she looked at me in disbelief. Then she suddenly broke into the kind of loud, cheerful, uninhibited laugh that only good-natured people with a sense of humour can produce.

‘If only I could tell them in St Petersburg!’ she said, leaning towards the table and nearly collapsing with laughter. ‘If only I could tell them in St Petersburg!’

IX

Now we met quite often, about twice a day. Almost every afternoon she came to the cemetery, where she read the inscriptions on crosses and tombstones while waiting for me. Sometimes she would come into the church and stand by me, watching me work. The silence, the painters’ and gilders’ simple work, Radish’s good sense, the fact that outwardly I was no different from the other men and worked just as they did, in waistcoat and old shoes, and the fact that they spoke to me as if I were one of them – all this was new to her and she found it moving. Once when she was there an artist who was high up painting a dove shouted down to me, ‘Misail, give me some whiting.’

I carried it up to him, and afterwards, when I was climbing down the rickety scaffolding, she looked at me, moved to tears, and smiling.

‘What a dear you are!’ she said.

Ever since I was a child I remembered how a green parrot had escaped from its cage in one of the rich men’s houses in the town and how it had wandered round the town for a whole month, lazily flying from garden to garden, lonely and homeless. Mariya Viktorovna put me in mind of that bird.

‘At the moment I’ve absolutely nowhere to go besides the cemetery,’ she told me laughing. ‘I’m bored to death in this town. At the Azhogins’ they do nothing but read, sing and babble away; I just can’t stand them lately. Your sister keeps to herself, Mademoiselle Blagovo hates me for some reason, and I don’t like the theatre. So where can I go?’

When I visited her I smelt of paint and turpentine and my hands were black. She liked this and wanted me to wear only my ordinary working clothes when I called on her. But they made me feel awkward in her drawing-room – it was as if I were in uniform, and therefore I always wore my new woollen suit when I went there. She didn’t like this.

‘You must admit, you haven’t quite got used to your new role,’ she told me once. ‘You feel awkward and embarrassed in your workman’s clothes. Tell me, is it because you’ve lost confidence in yourself, because you’re dissatisfied? This work you’ve chosen – all this splashing paint around – does that really satisfy you?’ she asked, laughing. ‘I know that painting makes things prettier, makes them last longer, but surely these things belong to the rich people in town and are really luxuries. Besides, as you yourself said more than once, everyone should earn bread by his labours, whereas you earn money, not bread. Why don’t you stick to the literal meaning of what you say? If it’s bread that you have to earn, then you must plough, sow, reap, thresh, or do something directly connected with agriculture – keeping cows, for example, digging, building log-huts…’

She opened a pretty little cupboard near her writing-table and said, ‘I’ve been telling you all this because I want to let you into my secret. Voilà. This is my agricultural library. Here are books on arable land, vegetable gardens, orchards, cattle-yards and bee-keeping. I love reading them, and I know all the theory already, in great detail. It’s my dream, my cherished wish to go to Dubechnya as soon as March is here. It’s wonderful there, fantastic! Don’t you agree? For the first year I’ll just look around to get the hang of things, but the following year I’ll really start work, without sparing myself, as they say. Daddy’s promised me Dubechnya and I can do anything I want there.’

Blushing, laughing and excited to the point of tears, she daydreamed aloud about her life at Dubechnya, about how interesting it would be. And I envied her. March wasn’t far away, the days were drawing out, thawing snow dripped from the roofs at midday in the bright sun and the smell of spring was in the air. I too longed for the country.

When she said that she was moving to Dubechnya I immediately saw myself left alone in the town, and I felt jealous of her book cupboard and her farming.

I didn’t know a thing about farming and I had no love for it. I almost told her that farming was a form of slavery, but I remembered my father having said something of the sort more than once, so I remained silent.

Lent began. Viktor Ivanych, the engineer, whose existence I had just about forgotten, arrived from St Petersburg quite unexpectedly, without even sending a telegram beforehand. When I arrived – in the evening, as usual – there he was, pacing the drawing-room and talking. He had just washed, and with his hair cut short he looked about ten years younger. His daughter was kneeling by his trunks, taking out boxes, scent bottles and books and handing them to Pavel, one of the male servants. When I saw the engineer I couldn’t help taking a step backwards, but he stretched both hands out to me and revealed his firm, white, coachman’s teeth as he smiled and said, ‘So it’s him! Here he is! Delighted to see you, Mr Painter! Masha’s told me everything; she’s been praising you to the skies. I understand you and heartily approve of what you’re doing.’

He took me by the arm and continued: ‘Being an honest workman is a sight more clear-headed and decent than using up reams of paper and wearing a ribbon in your hat. I used to work in Belgium myself, with these hands you see here, then I was an engine-driver for two years.’

He wore a short jacket and comfortable house-slippers, and he walked with a slight roll, as if he were suffering from gout; he kept rubbing his hands. He hummed, purred softly and squeezed himself from the sheer pleasure of being home again and having taken his beloved shower.

‘There’s no denying it,’ he told me over supper, ‘there’s no denying it. You are all nice, charming people, but as soon as you try to do any physical work or look after the peasants you end up religious fanatics. Why is it? Now, don’t deny it, you belong to some religious sect, don’t you? You don’t drink vodka, eh? What’s that if it isn’t belonging to some sect?’

Just to please him I drank some vodka, and some wine too. We tried different cheeses, sausages, pâtés, pickles and various savouries which the engineer had brought with him, and the wines that had arrived while he was abroad. The wines were excellent. Somehow he managed to bring in his wines and cigars duty-free. Someone sent him caviare and smoked sturgeon for nothing; he paid no rent for the flat since the landlord supplied paraffin to the railway. The general impression he and his daughter gave me was that all the best things in life were theirs for the asking and they received them free of charge.

I went on visiting them, but not so enthusiastically as before. The engineer cramped my style and I always felt uncomfortable when he was around. I could not stand those clear, innocent eyes, and his offensive remarks were very tiresome. I was irked by the thought too that only recently I had been under the command of that well-fed, red-faced man and that he had been dreadfully rude to me. True, he put his arm round my waist now, gave me friendly slaps on the shoulder and approved of my way of life, but I sensed that he still despised me for being a mediocrity and he only put up with me for his daughter’s sake. I could no longer laugh or say what I wanted, so I became stand-offish, and I was always expecting him to address me as a servant, like Pavel. How my petty provincial pride suffered! I, one of the working masses, a house-painter, visited the rich almost every day, people who lived in a different world, whom the whole town looked on as foreigners. Every day I drank expensive wines at their houses and ate exotic food – my conscience would not come to terms with that! On my way to their place I tried to look gloomy and avoided passers-by and scowled at them as if I really did belong to some religious sect. But when I left the engineer’s I was ashamed I had wined and dined so well.

Most of all, I was scared of falling in love. Whether I was walking down the street, working, talking to my workmates, all I could think of was going to see Mariya Viktorovna in the evening, and I would imagine her voice, her laughter, her walk. Before each visit I would stand for a long time in front of Nanny’s crooked looking-glass, tying my tie. My woollen suit repelled me. I was going through hell and at the same time I despised myself for taking such trivial things so seriously. When she called out from another room to say that she was not dressed yet and asked me to wait, I could hear her putting on her clothes. This disturbed me and I felt as though the floor were sinking under me. Whenever I saw a woman in the street, even far off, I could not help making comparisons, and then all our women and girls seemed vulgar, ridiculously dressed and without poise. These comparisons aroused the pride in me. Mariya Viktorovna was the best of the lot! And at night I dreamed of both of us.

Once, at supper, both of us, together with the engineer, polished off a whole lobster. Back home I remembered the engineer twice calling me ‘My dear young man!’ over supper and I realized that they were spoiling me like a huge, wretched stray dog; that they were only amusing themselves with me; and that they would drive me away like a dog when they were bored with me. I was ashamed and hurt – so hurt, I was close to tears, as if someone had insulted me. I looked up at the sky and vowed to put an end to it all.

Next day I didn’t go to the Dolzhikovs’. Late that evening (it was quite dark and raining) I strolled along Great Dvoryansky Street looking at the windows. At the Azhogins everyone was in bed – only one light burnt in one of the windows right at the end of the house – that was old Mrs Azhogin embroidering by the light of three candles and imagining she was carrying on the battle against superstition. Our house was dark, but over the road, at the Dolzhikovs’, the windows were bright, though I couldn’t see inside for the flowers and curtains. I continued to walk up and down the street and was drenched by the cold March rain. I heard Father returning from the club; he knocked on the gate and a minute later a light appeared at one of the windows and I saw my sister hurrying with a lamp and smoothing her thick hair with one hand as she went. Then Father paced the drawing-room, talking and rubbing his hands together, while my sister sat motionless in an armchair thinking and not listening to him.

But then they left the room and the light went out. I looked round at the engineer’s house – it was as dark as a well there now. In the gloom and the rain I felt desperately lonely, left to the mercy of fate. I felt that in comparison with my loneliness, my present sufferings, with what lay in store for me, how trivial everything was that I had ever done or wished for, thought or spoken of. Alas, the actions and thoughts of living beings are not nearly as important as their sorrows! Without knowing exactly what I was doing, I tugged as hard as I could at the bell on the Dolzhikovs’ gate – and broke it. I ran off in terror down the street like a naughty child, convinced they would come out at once and recognize me. When I stopped to catch my breath at the end of the street all I could hear was falling rain and a nightwatchman, far away, banging on his iron sheet.

For a whole week I stayed away from the Dolzhikovs’. I sold my woollen suit. There was no painting work about and once again I was half-starving, earning ten to twelve copecks a day where I could by doing heavy, nasty work. Wallowing up to my knees in cold mud and using all my strength, I tried to suppress any memories, as if taking revenge on myself for all those cheeses and tinned delicacies the engineer had treated me to. But no sooner did I climb into bed, hungry and wet, than my sinful imagination began to conjure up wonderful, seductive pictures and to my amazement I realized that I was in love, passionately so, and I would drop into a sound, healthy sleep, feeling that all the penal servitude was only making my body stronger.

One evening it snowed – quite out of season – and the wind blew from the north as if winter had returned. When I was home from work I found Mariya Viktorovna sitting in my room. She wore her fur coat, with her hands in a muff.

‘Why don’t you come any more?’ she asked, raising her clever, bright eyes. I was overcome with joy and stood stiffly in front of her, just as I had done before Father when he was about to hit me. She looked into my face and I could see by her eyes that she understood why I was overcome.

‘Why don’t you come any more?’ she repeated. ‘Well, as you don’t want to, I’ve come to you instead.’

She stood up and came close to me.

‘Don’t leave me,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I’m lonely, so terribly lonely!’

She began to cry and hid her face in her muff. ‘I’m lonely. Life is so dreadful, really dreadful, and besides you I’ve no one in the whole wide world. Don’t leave me!’

She searched for a handkerchief to dry her eyes and gave me a smile. We said nothing for some time, then I embraced her and kissed her, scratching my cheek on her hatpin until it bled. And we started talking as if we had been close to one another for a long, long time.

X

Two days later she sent me to Dubechnya, and words could not describe how delighted I was. As I walked to the station and later, as I sat in the train, I laughed for no reason and people thought I was drunk. It was snowing and there was frost in the mornings, but the roads were turning brown, and cawing rooks circled above them.

The first thing I wanted was to arrange accommodation for Masha and myself in the outbuilding, opposite Mrs Cheprakov’s. But it turned out to have long been the home of pigeons and ducks and it would have been impossible to clean it out without destroying a large number of nests. Whether we liked it or not, we had to move into the bleak rooms with Venetian blinds in the big house. This house was called The Palace by the peasants. It had more than twenty rooms, but the only furniture was a piano and a child’s armchair in the attic. Even if Masha had brought all her furniture from the town, we could not have destroyed that bleak, empty, cold atmosphere. I chose three small rooms with windows looking onto the garden, and I was busy from dawn to dusk cleaning them, putting in new window-panes, hanging wallpaper and filling in cracks and holes in the floor. It was easy, pleasant work. Now and then I ran down to the river to see if the ice was breaking up and I kept imagining that the starlings had returned. At night, as I thought of Masha, I felt overjoyed and entranced as I listened to the scurrying rats and the wind sighing and knocking above the ceiling. It sounded as if some old house goblin was coughing up in the attic.

The snow was deep. At the end of March there was another heavy fall, but it thawed quickly, as if by magic. The spring floods surged past and by the beginning of April the starlings were already chattering and yellow butterflies flitted around the garden. It was marvellous weather. Every day, just before evening, I went off to town to meet Masha. And how enjoyable it was walking barefoot along a road that was drying, but still soft! Halfway I would sit down and look at the town, not daring to go nearer. The sight of it disturbed me. I kept wondering how my friends would react once they heard of my love. What would Father say? The thought that my life had become so complicated that I could no longer keep it under control worried me more than anything. Life was carrying me away like a balloon – God knows where. I no longer thought about making ends meet or earning a living. I honestly can’t remember what I was thinking about.

When Masha arrived in her carriage, I would sit next to her and we would drive off to Dubechnya, happy and free. At other times, after waiting for the sun to set, I would go home, disconsolate and bored, wondering why she hadn’t come. Then suddenly a delightful apparition would greet me at the gate or in the garden – Masha! Later it turned out that she had come by train and had walked from the station. And what a wonderful occasion this used to be! She wore a modest woollen dress and scarf and held a simple umbrella. At the same time, she was tightly corseted and slim, and she wore expensive foreign boots. This was a talented actress playing the part of a small-town housewife. We would inspect the place and try to decide what rooms we would take and plan the paths, kitchen-garden and beehives. Already we had ducks and geese that we loved because they were ours. We had clover, oats, timothy grass, buckwheat and vegetable seeds – all ready for sowing. We spent a long time examining these things and wondering what the harvest would be like. Everything that Masha told me seemed exceptionally clever and fine. This was the happiest time of my life.

Soon after Easter we were married in our parish church at Kurilovka, the village about two miles from Dubechnya. Masha wanted everything simple. At her wish the ushers were lads from the village, and one parish clerk did all the singing. We returned from church in a small, shaky trap, which she drove. The only guest from town was my sister, to whom Masha had sent a note a couple of days before the wedding; she wore a white dress and gloves. During the ceremony she cried softly for joy, being deeply touched, and her expression was motherly, infinitely kind. Our happiness had intoxicated her and she smiled continually, as if inhaling heady fumes. Watching her during the service I realized that for her there was nothing finer in the whole world than earthly love. This was what she had always secretly longed for, timidly yet passionately. She kissed and embraced Masha. Not knowing how to express her joy she told her, ‘He’s a good man, so good!’

Before leaving she changed into her ordinary clothes and led me into the garden to talk to me in private.

‘Father’s very upset you didn’t write,’ she said. ‘You should have asked for his blessing. But he’s actually very pleased with you. He says that this wedding will raise your social status and that, under Masha’s influence, you’ll take things more seriously. We only talk about you in the evenings, and yesterday he even called you “our Misail”. This gave me so much joy. It seems he has a plan of some kind and I think that he wants to show you how magnanimous he can be, by being the first to talk of a reconciliation. Most likely he’ll soon be coming to see you here.’

Several times she quickly made the sign of the cross over me and said, ‘Well, God bless you. Be happy. Anyuta Blagovo is a very clever girl. She says that your marriage is a fresh ordeal sent by God. Yes, family life is not all bliss, there’s suffering too. You can’t avoid it.’

Masha and I walked about two miles with her as we saw her off. On our way back we walked quietly and slowly, as if taking a rest. Masha held my arm; I felt easy at heart and I didn’t want to talk about love any more. After the wedding we had grown even closer, had become kindred spirits, and it seemed nothing could keep us apart.

‘Your sister is a nice person,’ Masha said, ‘but she looks as if she’s been suffering never-ending torments. Your father must be a horrible man.’

I began telling her how my sister and I had been brought up and how our childhood had really been a meaningless ordeal. When she learnt that my father had struck me only recently she shuddered and pressed close to me.

‘Don’t say any more,’ she said. ‘It’s terrible.’

And now she did not leave me. We lived in three rooms in the big house and in the evenings we bolted the door to the empty part of the house, as if some stranger we feared was living there. I would rise at the crack of dawn and immediately get down to work. I used to mend carts, lay paths in the garden, dig the flowerbeds, paint the roof of the house. When the time for sowing oats came I tried double-ploughing, harrowing. All this I did conscientiously, and did not lag behind our farm labourer. I would become exhausted; the rain and the sharp, cold wind made my face and legs burn, and at nights I dreamed of ploughed land. Working in the fields held no delights for me. I knew nothing about farming and I disliked it – probably because my ancestors had never been tillers of the soil and pure town blood ran in my veins. I loved nature dearly, the fields and meadows and the vegetable gardens. But the wet, ragged peasant turning the earth with his plough and craning his neck as he urged on his wretched horse was for me the embodiment of crude, savage, monstrous strength. As I watched his clumsy movements I could never stop myself thinking of that long-past, legendary life, when man did not know the use of fire. Awesome bulls roaming around the peasant’s herd, horses stampeding through the village with pounding hooves – they scared the wits out of me. Any creature that was in the least large, strong and angry, whether a horned ram, a gander or a watchdog, seemed to symbolize that wild, crude strength. This prejudice was particularly strong in bad weather, when heavy clouds hung over the black plough-lands. But most of all, whenever I ploughed or sowed and two or three peasants stood watching me, I did not feel that my work was in any sense indispensable or that I was obliged to do it: I seemed to be merely amusing myself. I preferred working in the yard and I liked nothing better than painting roofs.

I used to walk through the garden and the meadow to our mill. This was rented to Stefan, a handsome, dark-skinned, tough-looking peasant from Kurilovka, with a thick black beard. He did not like working the mill, thinking it boring and unprofitable, and he only lived there to escape from home. He was a saddle-maker and always had a pleasant smell of tar and leather about him. Not very talkative, he was lethargic and sluggish. He was always humming, always sitting on the river bank or in his doorway. Sometimes his wife and mother-in-law – both pale-faced, languid and meek creatures – would come over from Kurilovka to see him. They would bow low and call him ‘Mr Stefan Petrovich’. He would not reply with a single movement or word, but sat by himself on the river bank softly humming. An hour or so would pass in silence. Then, after whispering to each other, the mother-in-law and wife would stand up and look at him for some time, waiting for him to turn round. Then they would make low curtsies and say ‘Goodbye, Stefan Petrovich!’ in their sugary, singsong voices. And then they would leave. Taking the bundle of rolls or the shirt they had left for him, Stefan would sigh and wink in their direction.

‘Women!’ he would say.

The two stones at the mill worked day and night. I helped Stefan and I enjoyed it. Whenever he went away I willingly took over.

XI

After the fine, warm weather there was a wet spell. Throughout May it rained and it was cold. The sound of the mill-wheels and the rain made one feel sleepy and lazy; so did the shaking floor and smell of flour. My wife appeared twice a day in her short fur jacket and rubber boots, and she would invariably say the same thing: ‘Call this summer! It’s worse than October!’

We would drink tea together, cook porridge, or silently sit for hours on end waiting for the rain to stop. Once, when Stefan had gone to the fair, Masha spent the whole night at the mill. When we got up, there was no telling what the time was, as the whole sky was dark with rain clouds. But sleepy cocks crowed in Dubechnya and corncrakes cried in the meadow: it was still very, very early. I went down to the millpond with my wife and hauled out the fish-trap that Stefan had thrown in the previous evening while we were there. One large perch was floundering about and a crayfish angrily stretched its claws upwards.

‘Let them go,’ Masha said. ‘Let them be happy too…’

Because we had got up very early and then done nothing, the day seemed extremely long, the longest day in my life. Just before evening Stefan returned and I went back home to the big house.

‘Your father came today,’ Masha told me.

‘Where is he, then?’

‘He’s gone. I sent him away.’

Seeing me standing there in silence, she realized that I was sorry for Father.

‘One must be consistent. I didn’t let him in and I sent a message telling him not to trouble himself about coming again.’

A minute later I was through the gates and on my way to sort things out with Father. It was muddy, slippery and cold. For the first time since the wedding I felt sad, and the thought that I was not living as I should flashed through my brain, which was exhausted by the long, grey day. I felt worn out, and gradually I succumbed to faint-heartedness and inertia: I had no desire to move or to think. After a few steps I gave up and went home.

Dolzhikov was standing in the middle of the yard, in a leather coat with hood.

‘Where’s the furniture?’ he shouted. ‘There used to be beautiful empire-style things, paintings, vases, but they’ve collared the lot! To hell with her, I bought the estate with the furniture!’

Close by, Moisey, the general’s wife’s handyman, stood crumpling his cap. He was about twenty-five, thin, pock-marked and with small, cheeky eyes. One cheek was larger than the other, as if he’d been lying on it.

‘But, sir, you did buy it without the furniture,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I do remember that.’

‘Shut up!’ the engineer shouted, turning crimson and shaking all over. His voice echoed right round the garden.

XII

Whenever I worked in the garden or in the yard, Moisey would stand nearby, hands behind his back, idly and cheekily looking at me with those tiny eyes of his. This irritated me so much that I would leave what I was doing and go away.

Stefan revealed that this Moisey had been the general’s wife’s lover. I noticed that when people came for money they would first turn to Moisey, and once I saw a peasant, black all over (he was probably a charcoal-burner), prostrating himself in front of him. Sometimes after an exchange of whispers he would hand out the money himself, without telling the mistress, from which I deduced that he did business transactions of his own, on the quiet.

He used to go shooting right under the windows in the garden, filched food from our larders and took horses without our permission. We were furious, and Dubechnya didn’t seem to be ours at all. Masha would turn pale.

‘Do we have to live with this scum for another eighteen months?’ she would ask.

Ivan, the son of the general’s wife, was a guard on our railway. During the winter he had grown terribly thin and weak. Just one glass of vodka was enough to make him drunk and he felt the cold if he was out of the sun. He loathed and was ashamed of having to wear a guard’s uniform. But it was a profitable job, he thought, since he was able to steal candles and sell them. My new position aroused mixed feelings in him – amazement, envy and the vague hope that he too might be lucky. He followed Masha with admiring eyes, asked what I had for dinner these days. His gaunt, ugly face would take on a sickly, sad expression and he twiddled his fingers as though he could actually touch my good fortune.

‘Now, listen, Better-than-Nothing,’ he said fussily, constantly relighting his cigarette. He always made a terrible mess wherever he stood, since he wasted dozens of matches on one cigarette. ‘Listen, things have reached rock-bottom with me. The worst of it is, every tinpot little subaltern thinks he’s entitled to shout “Hey, you, guard! You over there!” I’ve just about had enough of hearing all sorts of things in trains, and now I can see that this life stinks! My mother’s ruined me! A doctor told me once in a train that if the parents have no morals, then the children turn out drunks or criminals. That’s what!’

Once he came staggering into the yard, his eyes wandering aimlessly, his breathing heavy. He laughed, cried and went on as if he was delirious. All I could make out in that gibberish was ‘Mother! Where’s my mother?’, which he said weeping, like a child that has lost its mother in a crowd. I led him into the garden and laid him down under a tree. All day and night Masha and I took it in turns to sit with him. He was in a bad state and Masha looked into his pale, wet face with revulsion.

‘Are we really going to have this scum living in our yard another eighteen months? That’s horrible, horrible!’ she said.

And how much distress the peasants caused us! How many deep disappointments we suffered from the very beginning, in the spring, when we yearned for happiness! My wife was building a school for them. I drew up a plan for a school for sixty boys. The local authorities approved it but advised us to build it at Kurilovka, that large village about two miles away. As it happened, the school at Kurilovka, which was attended by children from four villages, including Dubechnya, was old and cramped and one had to be careful walking over the rotten floorboards. At the end of March Masha was appointed trustee of the Kurilovka school, as she had wished, and at the beginning of April we arranged three meetings where we tried to convince the peasants that their school was cramped and old, and someone from the local council and the inspector of state schools came. They too tried to make the peasants see sense. After each meeting they surrounded us and asked for a barrel of vodka. We felt hot amongst all that crowd and were very soon exhausted. So we went home, feeling dissatisfied and rather embarrassed. In the end the peasants picked a site for the school and had to fetch all the building materials from the town on their own horses. The first Sunday after the spring wheat had been sown, carts left Kurilovka and Dubechnya to fetch bricks for the foundations. The men left as soon as it was light and came back late in the evening – drunk, and complaining what a rotten job it was.

As if to spite us, the cold rainy weather lasted the whole of May. The roads were thick with mud. After returning from town the carts usually entered our yard, and what a dreadful sight this was! A pot-bellied horse would appear at the gates, straddling its forelegs. Before coming into the yard it appeared to bow; then a wet, slimy-looking thirty-foot beam would slide in on a low cart. Wrapped up against the rain, his coat flaps tucked inside his belt, a peasant would stride along beside it, not looking where he was going, and walking straight through the puddles. Another cart laden with planks would appear, then a third carrying a beam, then a fourth. Gradually the space in front of the house would become choked with horses, beams and planks. With heads covered and clothes tucked up, the peasants – both the men and women – would look male volently at our windows, make a dreadful racket and demand that the lady of the house come out. The swearing was appalling. Moisey would stand to one side and seemed to be revelling in the ignominy of our position.

‘We don’t want to do any more shifting!’ the peasants would shout. ‘We’re worn out! Let her go and fetch the stuff herself!’

Pale-faced and scared out of her wits at the thought that they might try and break into the house, Masha would send out the money for half a barrel. After that the noise would die down, and, one after the other, the long beams would trundle out of the yard again.

Whenever I went to the building-site my wife grew worried.

‘The peasants are in a nasty temper,’ she would say. ‘They might do something to you. Wait a moment, I’m coming with you.’

We would drive to Kurilovka together and there the carpenters would ask us for a tip. The timber frame was ready; it was time for laying the foundations, but the bricklayers didn’t turn up. The carpenters grumbled at the delay. When the bricklayers finally did turn up, they found that there was no sand – for some reason we’d forgotten this would be needed. The peasants took advantage of our desperate situation and asked for thirty copecks a load, although it wasn’t more than a few hundred yards from the site to the river, where the sand was taken from. And we needed more than five hundred loads. There was no end to the misunderstandings, swearing and cadging, which exasperated my wife. The foreman-bricklayer – an old man of seventy, by the name of Titus Petrov – would take her by the arm and say, ‘Look’ere! Just you bring me that sand and I’ll have ten men ’ere in two ticks and the job’ll be done in a couple of days. You see to it!’

The sand was brought; two days, four days, a week went by and still there was a gaping hole where the foundations were to be laid.

‘It’s enough to drive you insane!’ my wife said, terribly agitated. ‘What dreadful, really dreadful people!’

While all these arguments were going on, Viktor Ivanych came to see us. He brought some hampers of wine and savouries, took his time over his meal, then lay down on the terrace to sleep, snoring so loudly that the workmen shook their heads and said, ‘Now wotcher think of that!’

Masha was never pleased when he came. She didn’t trust him, but took his advice nonetheless. When he’d had his after-dinner nap, he would get up in a bad mood and say nasty things about the way we ran the house. Or he would say he was sorry that he’d bought Dubechnya, on which he’d lost so much money. At these moments poor Masha looked quite desperate. While she complained, he would yawn and say that the peasants needed a good thrashing. He called our marriage and life together a farce, a piece of irresponsible self-indulgence.

‘It’s not the first time she’s done something like this,’ he told me, referring to Masha. ‘Once she imagined she was an opera singer and ran away from me. I looked for her for two months and spent a thousand roubles on telegrams alone, my dear chap.’

He no longer called me ‘sectarian’ or ‘Mr Painter’ and he no longer approved of my living as a workman.

‘You’re a strange one, you are!’ he said. ‘You’re not normal! I’m not one for prophesying, but you’ll come to a bad end, you will!’

Masha slept badly at night and was always sitting at our bedroom window, deep in thought.

There was no more laughter at supper, no more of those endearingly funny faces. I felt wretched and when it rained every drop seemed to burrow its way into my heart. I was ready to fall on my knees before Masha and apologize for the weather. Whenever the peasants had a row in the yard, I felt that I was to blame for this as well. I would sit in one place for hours on end, just thinking what a wonderful person Masha was. I loved her passionately and everything she did or said captivated me. She had a liking for quiet, studious work and loved reading and studying for hours on end. Although she knew farming only from books, she amazed all of us with her knowledge. All the advice she gave us was always practical and was always put to good use. Besides this, she had such a fine character, such good taste and good humour – the good humour possessed usually only by very well-bred people.

For a woman like this, with a healthy, practical mind, the chaos in which we were living, with all its petty worries and squabbling, was a real ordeal. This was quite clear to me and I too could not sleep at night, as my brain was still active. Deeply affected by everything, I would toss and turn, not knowing what to do.

I used to gallop off to town to fetch books, papers, sweets and flowers for Masha. I would go fishing with Stefan and stood in the rain for hours on end, up to my neck in cold water, trying to bring variety to our table with a burbot. I would swallow my pride and request the peasants not to make a noise, treat them to vodka, bribe them and make various promises. There was no end to the silly things I did!

Finally the rain stopped and the earth dried out. I would rise at four in the morning and go out into the garden – here there were flowers sparkling with dew, the sounds of birds and insects – and not a cloud in the sky. The garden, the meadows and the river were all beautiful – and then I would remember the peasants, carts, the engineer! Masha and I would drive out into the fields in a racing-trap to look at the oats. She held the reins, with shoulders held high and the wind playing with her hair, while I sat behind.

‘Keep to the right!’ she would shout to passers-by.

‘You’re just like a coachman!’ I once told her.

‘That’s quite possible! After all, my grandfather’ (the engineer’s father) ‘was a coachman. Didn’t you know?’ she asked, turning round. And immediately she began to imitate the way coachmen sing and shout.

‘That’s great!’ I thought as I listened. ‘That’s great!’

And then I remembered the peasants, carts, the engineer…

XIII

Dr Blagovo arrived on a bicycle and my sister became a frequent visitor. Once again we talked about physical labour, progress and that mysterious Unknown awaiting mankind in the remote future. The doctor didn’t like farming, since it interfered with our discussions. Ploughing, reaping, grazing calves, he maintained, were not the right work for free men. In time people would delegate all these crude forms of the struggle for survival to animals and machines, while they would devote all their time to scientific research. My sister kept begging us to let her go home early, and if she stayed late or spent the night with us, there was terrible trouble.

‘God, what a child you are!’ Masha reproached her. ‘It’s really rather stupid!’

‘Yes, it is,’ my sister agreed. ‘I admit it. But what can I do if I can’t control myself? I always think I’m behaving badly.’

During haymaking my whole body ached, since I wasn’t used to the work. If I sat on the terrace in the evening chatting I would suddenly fall asleep and everyone would roar with laughter, wake me up and sit me down at the supper table. Even so, I would still be overcome by drowsiness and, as if half-dreaming, I would see lights, faces, plates. I would hear voices without understanding what they said – after that early morning start I had immediately picked up my scythe, or I’d gone off to the building-site and been working there all day long.

On holidays, when I stayed at home, I noticed that my wife and sister were hiding something from me and even seemed to be avoiding me. My wife was as tender with me as before, but she was harbouring some thoughts of her own that she did not wish to reveal to me. There was no doubt that she was getting increasingly annoyed with the peasants and the life here had become much more difficult for her. But she no longer complained to me. Nowadays she preferred talking to the doctor than to me and I couldn’t understand why.

It was the custom in our province, at haymaking and harvest-time, for the workers to come to the big house in the evenings for their vodka treat. Even the young girls would drink a glass. But we did not observe this custom. The reapers and peasant women would stand in our yard until late evening, waiting for some vodka, and then they left swearing. Masha would frown sternly the whole time and say nothing, or else she would whisper irritably to the doctor, ‘Savages! Barbarians!’

In the country, newcomers usually meet with an unfriendly, almost hostile reception, like new boys at school. And this was what we got. At first they took us for stupid, simple-minded people who had bought the estate because we did not know what to do with our money. They just laughed at us. Peasants let their cattle graze in our wood, even in the garden; they drove our cows and horses to the village and then came asking for money to repair the damage they had done. The whole village would flock into our yard, noisily maintaining that, when we were cutting the hay, we had trespassed on some fields at some Bysheyevka or Semyonikha or other that did not belong to us. But as we were not yet sure of our exact boundaries we took their word for it and paid the fine. Subsequently it turned out that we had been in the right after all. They stripped lime bark off the trees in our wood. One profiteer from Dubechnya, a peasant trading in vodka without a licence, bribed our workers, and the whole bunch of them played the most dirty tricks on us. They replaced our new cartwheels with old, they made off with the horse collars we used for ploughing and sold them back to us, and so on. But worst of all was what happened at the Kurilovka building-site. The women there stole planks, bricks, tiles and iron at night. The village elder would search their places with witnesses and each one would be fined two roubles at a village meeting. Subsequently the money from the fines was spent on drinks for everyone in the village.

Whenever Masha found out about these things she would angrily tell the doctor or my sister, ‘What animals! It’s appalling, shocking!’

And more than once I heard her regretting that she had ever taken on the task of building a school.

‘Please understand,’ the doctor would try and convince her, ‘if you build a school and generally do good deeds, it’s not for the peasants, but in the interests of culture, it’s for the future. And the worse the peasants are, the more reason there is for building a school. Please understand that!’

But there was no conviction in his voice and it struck me that he detested the peasants as much as Masha did.

Masha often went to the mill with my sister and they would both laugh and say that they were going to look at Stefan because he was so handsome. As it turned out, Stefan was taciturn and slow on the uptake only with men; with women he was free and easy and could never stop talking. Once, when I went down to the river for a swim I happened to overhear them. Masha and Cleopatra, in white dresses, were sitting on the river bank in the broad shade of a willow, while Stefan stood nearby with his hands behind his back.

‘D’ye think them peasants is human beings?’ he asked. ‘No, they’re not. Begging your pardons, they’re wild animals, crooks. What kind of life does a peasant lead? Drinking and eating the cheapest stuff he can get and bawling his head off in the pub. And he can’t talk proper, can’t be’ave, no manners. He’s an ignorant oaf! He wallows in muck, so’s his wife, so’s his children. He sleeps in his clothes, picks spuds out of the soup with ’is fingers, drinks kvass with black beetles an’ all – don’t ever trouble his self to blow’em away!’

‘But he’s so dreadfully poor!’ my sister interrupted.

‘What d’ye mean poor! He’s just not well-off; there’s all kinds of not being well-off, lady. If someone’s in jail, or blind, or hasn’t got no legs, you wouldn’t wish that on anyone. But if he’s free, has’ is wits about him, has eyes and hands, faith in God, what more does he need? It’s just pampering hisself, lady. It’s ignorance but it ain’t poverty. Supposing you honest folk with your fine education tried to help him, out of pity. Why, he’s so low he’ll spend all the money on drink. Even worse, he’ll open a pub’ is self and use your money to cheat his own people with. You mentioned poverty. But does a rich peasant live any better? Begging your pardons, he lives like a pig too. He’s a bully, a loudmouth, a blockhead, broader than he’s long, with a fat red mug. I’d like to take a swing and bash the bastard’s face in. That old Larion from Dubechnya, he’s got money, but I’ll bet he’s as good at stripping the trees in your forest as the poor ones. And he’s got a foul mouth, and his children. And as soon as’ e’s had a drop too much he’ll flop face first into a puddle and fall asleep. They’re not worth a light, lady. It’s hell living in the same village as them. I’m sick and tired of the village and I thank the Lord above I’ve enough to eat. I’ve got clothes, I’ve served my time in the dragoons, was a village elder for three years and now I’m a free man. I live where I like. I don’t want to live in the village and no one can force me. Folk tells me I’ve a wife, that it’s my duty to live in a cottage with my wife. But why? I wasn’t taken on as a servant.’

‘Tell me, Stefan, did you marry for love?’ Masha asked.

‘What love can there be in a village?’ Stefan replied, smiling. ‘If you’d really like to know, lady, it’s my second marriage. I’m not from Kurilovka, but Zalegoshch.⁹ I settled in Kurilovka when I got married. I mean to say, my father didn’t want to divide the land between us – and there was five of us brothers. So I says my goodbyes and off I goes to a strange village, to my wife’s family. But my first wife died young.’

‘From what?’

‘From being stupid. She used to cry, keep on and on for no reason at all and so she wasted away. She kept drinking herbs to make herself look prettier and it must have damaged her insides. My second wife, the one from Kurilovka – what’s special about her? She’s a village woman, a peasant, that’s all. I felt drawn towards her when the match was being made, and thought she was young, all nice and pure-looking, and it was a clean-living family. Her mother was a Khlyst,¹⁰ drank coffee. Most important, she lived cleanly. So I got married then, and the very next day, when we was sitting down to eat, I asked my mother-in-law for a spoon. She gave me one, but I saw her wiping it with her finger. Well, now, I thought to myself, that’s how clean you are! I lived with them for a year and then I left. Per’aps I should have married a town girl,’ he went on after a pause. ‘They say a wife is a helpmate to her husband. What do I need a helpmate for? I can help myself. And I’d like you to speak nice and sensibly to me, not all that posh talk. Nice and proper, with feeling. What’s life without a good natter!’

Stefan suddenly fell silent and immediately I heard his dull, monotonous humming. That meant he had spotted me.

Masha often went to the mill and she enjoyed talking to Stefan. She liked his company, because he seemed so genuine, so convincing when he cursed those peasants. Whenever she returned from the mill the village idiot who kept watch over the orchard would shout, ‘Hey, girl! Hullo, girlie!’ And he would bark at her like a dog.

She would stop and look at him closely, as if she had found an answer to her thoughts in that idiot’s barking. Most probably it had the same fascination as Stefan’s swearing. Some unpleasant news was always waiting for her at home – for example, the village geese had flattened the cabbages in our garden, or Larion had stolen the reins. Smiling and shrugging her shoulders, she would say, ‘But what do you expect from such people!?’

She would become highly indignant and things really were beginning to boil up inside her. But I grew used to the peasants and felt drawn more and more to them. They were mostly very nervy, irritable, downtrodden people. They were people whose imagination had been crushed, they were ignorant, with a limited, dull range of interests and were forever thinking about grey soil, grey days, black bread. They were people who tried to be cunning but, like birds, thought that they could get away with hiding only their heads behind a tree. They couldn’t count. Twenty roubles would not tempt them to come and help you in the haymaking, but they would turn up for half a barrel of vodka, although the twenty roubles could have bought them four. And there was in fact filth, drunkenness, stupidity and cheating. But for all this, I had the feeling that, on the whole, peasant life had firm, sound foundations. Yes, the peasant did resemble some great clumsy beast as he followed his wooden plough; he did stupefy himself with vodka. But when one took a closer look, he seemed to possess something vital and highly important, something that Masha, for example, and the doctor lacked. What I’m talking about is his belief that truth is the chief thing on earth and that he and the whole nation can be saved only by the truth. Therefore he loves justice more than anything in the world. I used to tell my wife that she couldn’t see the glass for the stains on the window-pane. She would either not reply or would hum like Stefan. Whenever that kind, clever woman turned pale with indignation and spoke to the doctor with trembling voice about drunkenness and cheating, she amazed me with the shortness of her memory. How could she forget that her father, the engineer, also drank – drank a great deal – and that the money with which he had bought Dubechnya came from a whole series of brazen, shameless swindles? How could she forget that?

XIV

My sister lived a life of her own too, which she took great pains to hide from me. She and Masha had frequent whispering sessions. Whenever I went up to her she would shrink back and her eyes would take on a guilty, pleading look. Clearly something she feared or was ashamed of was preying on her mind. To avoid meeting me in the garden or being left alone with me she kept close to Masha the whole time. It was only rarely – during dinner – that I had the chance to speak to her.

One evening I was quietly walking through the garden on my way home from the building-site. It had already begun to grow dark. Without noticing me or hearing my footsteps there was my sister, as quiet as a ghost, near an old wide-spreading apple tree. She was dressed in black and was hurrying backwards and forwards in a straight line, always looking at the ground. An apple fell from a tree. She started at the noise, stopped and pressed her hands to her temples. At that moment I went over to her.

A feeling of tender love rushed to my heart as I tearfully held her shoulders and kissed her. For some reason our mother, our childhood, came to mind. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘You’re miserable. I’ve noticed that for a long time now. Tell me, what’s wrong?’

‘I’m frightened…’ she said, trembling.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked again. ‘For God’s sake, you can be frank with me!’

‘I will be frank, I’ll tell you the whole truth. It’s so hard, it’s agony hiding things from you! Misail, I’m in love,’ she went on in a whisper. ‘I’m in love, in love… I’m happy, but why am I so frightened?’

We heard footsteps and Dr Blagovo, in a silk shirt and top boots, appeared among the trees. Obviously they had a rendezvous, here by the apple tree. The moment she saw him she dashed impulsively over to him with a pained cry, as if he were being taken away from her.

‘Vladimir! Vladimir!’

She pressed close to him and hungrily gazed into his eyes. Only then did I notice how thin and pale she had grown recently. This was especially noticeable from that long-familiar lace collar, which now hung more loosely than ever around her long, thin neck. The doctor was taken aback, but quickly recovered, stroked her hair and said, ‘Now, now, it’s all right. Why are you so nervous? I’m here now, you see.’

We said nothing and sheepishly eyed one another. Then the three of us went off and I heard the doctor telling me, ‘Cultural life hasn’t begun yet in this country. The old console themselves – even if nothing is happening at the moment, things were happening in the forties and sixties, they say. But these are old men, and you and I are young, our brains aren’t afflicted yet with senile decay, therefore we cannot comfort ourselves with such illusions. Russia began in the year AD 862,¹¹ but civilized Russia, as I understand it, hasn’t started yet.’

But I didn’t attempt to follow these ideas of his. It was all rather strange. I didn’t want to believe that my sister was in love, that here she was walking along arm-in-arm with a stranger, giving him fond looks. My own sister, that neurotic, downtrodden, enslaved creature, loved a married man with children! Something made me feel sorry, but I couldn’t pinpoint it. I found the doctor’s company somewhat disagreeable, and I had no idea what would become of this love of theirs.

XV

Masha and I drove to Kurilovka for the opening of the school.

‘Autumn, autumn, autumn,’ Masha said softly as she looked around. ‘Summer has passed. The birds have gone, only the willows are green.’

Yes, summer was over. Bright, warm days had set in, but the mornings were chilly, shepherds were wearing their sheepskin coats now and the dew stayed all day on the asters in the garden. We kept hearing plaintive sounds and we couldn’t tell if they were shutters groaning on rusty hinges or if the cranes were flying. It made one feel so good, so full of life!

‘Summer has passed,’ Masha said. ‘Now you and I can take stock. We’ve worked a lot, thought a lot, and we are all the better for it and should feel proud of ourselves. We’ve improved our own lives, but has our success had any visible effect on the lives around us? Has it been of use to anyone? No. Ignorance, personal filthiness, drunkenness, a shockingly high infant mortality rate – everything’s just as it ever was. All your ploughing and sowing, my spending money and reading books – this hasn’t made anyone’s life better. We’ve worked, indulged in lofty thinking for ourselves alone – that’s for sure.’

This kind of argument baffled me and I didn’t know what to think.

‘We’ve been sincere from start to finish,’ I said, ‘and sincere people have right on their side.’

‘I don’t deny it. We were right in our thinking but wrong in the way we set about things. It was mostly our methods that were wrong, weren’t they? You want to be useful to people, but the mere fact of buying an estate rules out any possibility of helping them from the start. What’s more, if you work, dress and eat like a peasant, you lend your authority and approval to their heavy clumsy clothes, their dreadful huts and stupid beards. On the other hand, let’s suppose you work for a very long time – all your life – so that in the end you achieve some practical results. But what do these amount to? What good are they against elemental forces, such as wholesale ignorance, hunger, cold, degeneracy? They’re a mere drop in the ocean! To counter those things you need a different line of attack, one that is powerful, bold, speedy! If you really do want to be useful, then you must abandon your narrow sphere of activity and act directly on the masses! Above all you need noisy, vigorous propaganda. Why is art – music, for example – really so alive, so popular, so powerful? Because the musician or singer influences thousands at the same time. Dear, wonderful art!’ she went on, dreamily gazing at the sky. ‘Art gives you wings and carries you far, far away! For those who are tired of filth, petty trifling concerns, for those who are confused, outraged, indignant, there is peace and satisfaction only in beauty.’

When we drove towards Kurilovka the weather was bright and joyful. In the farmyards, here and there, they were threshing and there was a smell of rye-straw. Behind some wattle fences was a bright red mountain ash, and wherever one looked every tree was golden or red. The church bells were ringing and icons were being carried to the school. I could hear them singing ‘Holy Virgin, Intercessor’.¹² And how clear the air was, how high the pigeons were flying!

The service was held in a classroom. Then the peasants from Kurilovka presented Masha with an icon and those from Dubechnya brought her a large pretzel and a gilt saltcellar. Masha began to sob.

‘If we’ve said something out of turn or been a nuisance, please forgive us,’ an old man said as he bowed to us both.

On the way home Masha kept looking around at the school. The green roof that I had painted glistened in the sun and we could see it for a long time afterwards. Masha was now glancing at it in farewell.

XVI

That evening she set off for town. Recently she had been going to town often and spending the night there. When she was away I couldn’t work, my head drooped and I felt weak. Our great yard seemed like some bleak, revolting wasteland, and there were angry noises in the garden. Without Masha the house, the trees, the horses were no longer ‘ours’, as far as I was concerned.

I never left the house, but sat at Masha’s table, near the cupboard full of farming books – those old favourites that were needed no longer and which looked at me with such embarrassment. For hours on end, while it struck seven, eight, nine, while the sooty black autumn night crept up to the windows, I would examine her old glove or the pen she always used, or her little scissors. I did nothing and I understood quite clearly that everything I’d done before – ploughing, reaping, felling trees – had only been done because that was her wish. If she had sent me to clean out a deep well, where I would have had to stand waist-deep in water, I would have climbed in without asking myself if it needed cleaning or not. But now, when she was away, Dubechnya struck me as sheer chaos with its ruins, banging shutters, untidiness, and stealing twenty-four hours a day. In that kind of place any sort of work was a waste of time. And why should I work there, why all that worrying about the future, when I felt that the ground was giving way beneath me, that my role here in Dubechnya was played out – in short, when I felt that I was doomed to the same fate as those farming books? It was awful in the lonely hours of the night, when every minute I feared that someone might shout that it was time I left. It wasn’t Dubechnya that I regretted, but my own love, whose autumn had clearly arrived. What happiness, to love and be loved! And how dreadful to feel that you’re beginning to fall off that lofty tower!

Masha returned from town the following day, towards evening. Something was annoying her, but she tried to hide it and she only inquired why all the winter window-frames had been put in – it was simply stifling, she said. So I took two frames out. We weren’t very hungry, but we sat down to supper all the same.

‘Go and wash your hands,’ my wife said. ‘You smell of putty.’

She had brought some new illustrated journals from town and after supper we looked at them together. There were supplements with fashion-plates and patterns. Masha just glanced at them and laid them to one side to have a proper look at later on. But one dress with a wide, smooth, bell-shaped skirt and full sleeves caught her eye and she seriously examined it for about a minute.

‘That’s not bad,’ she said.

‘Yes, it would suit you very well!’ I said. ‘Very well.’

I felt touched as I looked at the dress, admiring that grey blotch only because she liked it.

‘A wonderful, charming dress!’ I continued, tenderly. ‘My beautiful, marvellous Masha! My dear Masha!’

And my tears fell on to the fashion-plate.

‘Wonderful Masha!’ I muttered. ‘My dear, lovely, darling Masha.’

She went to bed, while I stayed up for another hour looking at the illustrations.

‘You shouldn’t have taken those window-frames out,’ she called from the bedroom. ‘I hope it won’t be cold now. Really, you can feel the draught!’

I read something in the miscellany – about how to make cheap ink and about the largest diamond in the world. And again my attention was caught by that illustration of the dress she had liked and I imagined her at a ball, with fan, bare shoulders, brilliant, splendid, knowing all about music, painting, literature. How small and brief my role in her life seemed!

Our meeting one another, our married life, were only an episode – only one of many to come in the life of this lively, richly talented woman. All the best things in this world, as I’ve already pointed out, were at her feet, they were hers for nothing. Even ideas and the latest intellectual trends were a source of pleasure for her, bringing variety to her life. I was only the cab-driver, taking her from one infatuation to the other. Now that I was no longer needed, she would fly away, leaving me alone.

As if in answer to my thoughts, a desperate shout suddenly rang out in the yard.

‘He-elp!’

It was a thin, female-like voice. As though trying to mimic it, the wind suddenly shrilled in the chimney. Half a minute passed and again I heard that voice through the sound of the wind, but this time it appeared to come from the other end of the yard.

‘He-elp!’

‘Misail, did you hear that?’ my wife asked softly. ‘Did you hear?’

She came out from her bedroom in her nightdress, her hair hanging loose; peering at the dark window, she listened hard.

‘Someone’s being murdered!’ she said. ‘That’s the last straw!’

I took my gun and went out. It was very dark outside and the strong wind made it difficult to stand. I walked up to the gates and listened. The trees moaned, the wind whistled and a dog – most likely the village idiot’s – lazily howled in the garden. Outside the gates it was pitch-dark, without one light along the railway track. From somewhere just by the outbuilding where the office had been last year, there suddenly came a strangled cry.

‘He-elp!’

‘Who’s there?’ I called.

Two men were struggling. One was pushing, the other trying to hold his ground, and both were breathing heavily.

‘Let go!’ one of them said and I recognized Ivan Cheprakov. So he was the one who had shouted in that shrill, woman’s voice. ‘Let go, damn you, or I’ll bite your hands!’ he said.

I recognized the other as Moisey. As I parted them I couldn’t resist hitting Moisey twice in the face. He fell, stood up, and then I hit him again.

‘That gent wanted to kill me,’ he muttered. ‘He was trying to get into his mum’s chest of drawers. I’d like to have him locked up in the outbuilding, for safety’s sake, sir.’

Cheprakov was drunk and didn’t recognize me. He breathed heavily, as if filling his lungs before shouting ‘He-elp!’ again.

I left them and went back into the house. My wife was lying on the bed, fully dressed. I told her what had happened outside and did not even hide the fact that I had hit Moisey.

‘It’s terrible living in the country,’ she said. ‘And what a long night, damn it.’

‘He-elp!’ came the cry again.

‘I’ll go and separate them,’ I said.

‘No, let them tear each other’s throats out,’ she said with a disgusted look.

She glanced up at the ceiling, listening hard, while I sat close by, not daring to speak and feeling that I was to blame for those cries for help outside and for the interminable night.

We said nothing to each other and I waited impatiently for dawn to glimmer at the windows. Masha looked as if she had just come out of a deep sleep and now she was asking herself how such a clever, well-educated, respectable woman like herself could land herself in this wretched, provincial wilderness, among a crowd of insignificant nobodies. How could she lower herself so, fall for one of these people and be his wife for more than six months? I felt that it was all the same if it were me, Moisey or Cheprakov: for her, everything had become identified with that drunken, wild cry for help – myself, our marriage, our farming and the dreadful autumn roads. When she sighed or made herself more comfortable, I could read in her face: ‘Oh, please come quickly, morning!’

In the morning she left. I stayed on at Dubechnya for another three days waiting for her. Then I packed all our things into one room, locked it and walked to town. When I rang the engineer’s bell it was already evening and the lamps were lit on Great Dvoryansky Street. Pavel told me there was no one at home. Viktor Ivanych had gone to St Petersburg, while Mariya Viktorovna must be at a rehearsal at the Azhogins’. I remember how anxious I felt as I went to the Azhogins’, how my heart throbbed and sank as I climbed the stairs and stood for a long time on the landing, not daring to enter that temple of the muses. In the ballroom, candles in groups of three were burning everywhere – on the little table, on the piano and on the stage. The first performance was to be on the thirteenth and the first rehearsal on a Monday, an unlucky day. This was the battle against superstition! All the lovers of drama were already there. The eldest, middle and youngest sisters were walking over the stage, reading their parts from notebooks. Away from everybody stood Radish, his head pressed sideways to the wall as he watched the stage with adoring eyes, waiting for the rehearsal to begin. Everything was still the same!

I went over to greet the mistress of the house when suddenly everyone started crying ‘Ssh!’ and waving at me to tread softly. There was silence. They raised the piano lid and a lady sat down and screwed up her shortsighted eyes at the music. Then my Masha walked over to the piano. She was beautifully dressed – but she looked beautiful in a strange new way, not at all like the Masha who had come to see me at the mill that spring.

Why do I love thee, O radiant night?¹³

It was the first time since I had known her that I had heard her sing. She had a fine, rich, powerful voice, and hearing her was like eating a ripe, sweet, fragrant melon. When she finished everyone applauded and she smiled and looked very pleased as she flashed her eyes, turned over the music and smoothed her dress. She was like a bird that has finally broken out of its cage and preens its wings in freedom. Her hair was combed behind her ears and she looked aggressive, defiant, as if she wanted to challenge us all or shout at us, as though we were horses, ‘Whoa, my beauties!’

And at that moment she must have looked very like her grandfather, the coachman.

‘So you’re here as well?’ she said, giving me her hand. ‘Did you hear me sing? What do you think of it?’ And without waiting for a reply she went on, ‘You’ve timed it very well. Tonight I’m leaving for St Petersburg, just for a short stay. Is that all right with you?’

At midnight I took her to the station. She embraced me tenderly – most probably out of gratitude for not bothering her with useless questions, and she promised to write. For a long time I held and kissed her hands, barely able to keep back my tears and without saying a single word to her.

After she had gone I stood looking at the receding lights and fondled her in my imagination.

‘My dear Masha, my wonderful Masha,’ I said softly.

I stayed the night at Karpovna’s in Makarikha. In the morning,

Radish and I upholstered some furniture for a rich merchant who was marrying his daughter to a doctor.

XVII

On Sunday my sister came for tea.

‘I’m reading a lot now,’ she said, showing me some books that she had borrowed from the public library on her way. ‘I must thank your wife and Vladimir, they’ve made me aware again. They’ve saved me and made me feel like a human being. Up to now I couldn’t sleep at night for worrying – “Oh, we’ve used too much sugar this week! Oh, I mustn’t put too much salt on the cucumbers!” I don’t sleep now, but I’ve other thoughts on my mind. It’s sheer torture to think how stupidly, spinelessly I’ve spent half my life. I despise my past, I’m ashamed of it, and now I consider Father my enemy. Oh, how grateful I am to your wife! And Vladimir? He’s such a wonderful man! They’ve opened my eyes.’

‘That’s no good, not sleeping,’ I said.

‘So you think I’m ill? Not one bit. Vladimir listened to my chest and told me I’m perfectly healthy. But it’s not my health that’s the problem, that’s not so important… Tell me, am I right in what I’m doing?’

She needed moral support, that was clear. Masha had gone, Dr Blagovo was in St Petersburg, and except myself there was no one in town to tell her that she was right. She stared at me, trying to read my innermost thoughts, and if I was thoughtful or silent in her company, she would take it personally and become miserable. I had to be on my guard the whole time and whenever she asked me if she was right, I would hurriedly reply that she was and that I had great respect for her.

‘Did you know? I’ve been given a part at the Azhogins’,’ she continued. ‘I want to act. I want to live, to drain the cup of life. I’ve no talent at all, and the part’s only ten lines. But that’s still infinitely better and nobler than pouring out tea five times a day and spying on the cook to see if she’s been eating too much. But most important, Father must come and see that I’m capable of protesting.’

After tea she lay down on my bed and stayed there for some time with her eyes closed, looking very pale.

‘How feeble,’ she exclaimed, getting up. ‘Vladimir said that all the women and girls in this town have become anaemic from laziness. How clever Vladimir is! He’s right, so absolutely right. One must work!’

Two days later she went to a rehearsal at the Azhogins’, notebook in hand. She wore a black dress with a coral necklace, a brooch that resembled puff-pastry from a distance, and large earrings, each with a jewel sparkling in it. I felt embarrassed looking at her and was shocked at her lack of taste. Others noticed too how unsuitably dressed she was, how out of place those earrings with the jewels were. I could see their smiles, and I heard someone laugh and say, ‘Queen Cleopatra of Egypt!’

She had tried to be worldly, relaxed and assured, but she had only succeeded in looking pretentious and bizarre. Her simplicity and charm had deserted her.

‘I just told Father that I was going to a rehearsal,’ she began, coming over to me, ‘and he shouted that he wouldn’t give me his blessing and he even nearly hit me. Just imagine, I don’t know my part,’ she said, glancing at the notebook. ‘I’m bound to mess it up. And so,’ she went on, highly agitated, ‘the die is cast. The die is cast…’

She felt that everyone was looking at her, that everyone was amazed at the decisive step she had taken, and that something special was expected of her. It was impossible to convince her that no one ever took any notice of such dull, mediocre people as she and I.

She didn’t come on until the third act, and her part – a guest, a provincial scandalmonger – was merely to stand at the door as though eavesdropping and then make a short speech. For at least half an hour before her cue, while others strolled across the stage, read, drank tea, argued, she never left my side. She kept mumbling her lines and nervously crumpling her notebook. Imagining that everyone was looking at her and waiting for her to come on, she kept smoothing her hair with trembling hand.

‘I’m bound to do it wrong,’ she told me. ‘If you knew how dreadful I feel! It’s as if I’m being led out to execution, I’m so scared!’

In the end it was her cue.

‘Cleopatra Poloznev, you’re on!’ the producer said.

She went out into the middle of the stage and she looked ugly and clumsy. Horror was written all over her face. She stood there for about thirty seconds as if in a stupor – quite still apart from the enormous earrings swinging on her ears.

‘As it’s the first time, you can use the book,’ someone said.

I saw quite clearly that she was shaking so much that she could neither speak nor open the book, and that she wasn’t up to it at all. I was just about to go over and speak to her when she suddenly sank on to her knees in the middle of the stage and burst into loud sobs.

There was general uproar and commotion. Only I stood still as I leant on the scenery in the wings, shattered by what had happened and at a complete loss what to do. I saw them lift her up and take her away. I saw Anyuta Blagovo come up to me. Until then I hadn’t noticed her in the ballroom and now she seemed to have sprung out of the floor. She wore her hat and veil and, as always, looked as if she had only dropped in for a minute.

‘I told her not to try and act,’ she said angrily, snapping out each word and blushing. ‘It’s sheer madness! You should have stopped her!’

Thin and flat-chested, Mrs Azhogin hurried over in a short blouse with short sleeves – there was cigarette ash on the front.

‘It’s terrible, my dear,’ she said, wringing her hands and staring me in the face as usual. ‘It’s terrible. Your sister’s in a certain condition… she’s… mm… pregnant! Take her away from here, I request you to.’

She was breathing heavily from excitement. Her three daughters, as thin and flat-chested as the mother, stood nearby, huddling together in terror. They were petrified, as if a convict had been caught in their house. How disgraceful, how terrible, they would have said! And yet this honourable family had been fighting prejudice and superstition throughout its existence. In their considered opinion, three candles, the thirteenth, unlucky Monday, constituted the entire stock of the superstitions and errors of mankind.

‘I must re quest you…’ Mrs Azhogin repeated, pursing her lips on the ‘quest’. ‘I must request you to take her home.’

XVIII

A little later my sister and I were walking down the street, and I protected her with the skirt of my coat. We hurried along side-streets where there were no lamps, avoiding passers-by as if we were fugitives.

She no longer cried, but looked at me with dry eyes. It was only about twenty minutes’ walk to Makarikha, where I was taking her, and, strange to relate, in that short time we managed to recall the whole of our lives. We discussed everything, weighed up our position, thought of the best course of action.

We decided that we could stay no longer in that town and that as soon as I had a little money we would move somewhere else. In some houses the people were already in bed, in others they were playing cards. We detested and feared those houses and talked about the fanaticism, callousness and worthlessness of those worthy families, those lovers of dramatic art whom we had frightened so much. ‘How are those stupid, cruel, lazy, dishonest people any better than the drunken, superstitious peasants of Kurilovka?’ I asked. ‘Are they any better than animals, which are similarly thrown into disarray when some random incident upsets the monotony of their lives that are bounded by instincts?’ What would happen to my sister now if she continued to live at home? What moral torments would she have to endure, talking to Father, or meeting her friends every single day? I saw all this quite clearly and then I recalled all those people I knew who were slowly being hounded to death by their nearest and dearest. I remembered those tormented dogs that had gone mad, those live sparrows plucked bare by street urchins and thrown into water. And I remembered the long, long unbroken sequence of muted, protracted suffering that I had observed in that town since childhood. And I could not understand how those sixty thousand people coped, why they read the Gospels, prayed, read books and magazines. What good to them was all that had been so far written and spoken by mankind if they were still spiritually unenlightened, if they still had the same horror of freedom as a hundred, three hundred years ago? A carpenter would spend all his life building houses in that town, but for all that he would go to his grave mispronouncing ‘gallery’. Similarly, those sixty thousand inhabitants had been reading and hearing about truth, mercy and freedom for generations, yet to their dying day they would carry on lying from morning to night, making life hell for each other, and they feared and loathed freedom as if it were their deadly enemy.

‘So, my fate is decided,’ my sister said when we arrived home. ‘After what has happened I can never go back there again. Heavens, that’s good! I feel better now.’

She immediately went to bed. Tears glistened on her eyelashes, but her face was happy. She slept soundly and sweetly and I could see that she really was relaxed and able to rest now. It was simply ages since she had slept like that.

And so our life together began. She was always singing and telling me that she felt very well. Books borrowed from the library were returned by me unread, since she wasn’t in the mood for reading now. Her only wish was to dream and talk of the future. While she mended my underwear or helped Karpovna at the stove, she would hum or talk about her Vladimir, praising his intellect, good manners, kindness, exceptional learning. I would agree with her, although I didn’t like her doctor any more. She wanted to work and earn her own living, without any assistance. She said that she was going to be a teacher as soon as she was well enough and that she would scrub floors and do the washing herself. She loved her unborn child passionately – even though he had not entered this world yet. She knew already the colour of his eyes, what his hands were like, how he laughed. She loved talking about education, and since Vladimir was the best person in the world, all her thoughts on the subject centred around one thing – the son must be as fascinating as the father. We talked endlessly and everything she said filled her with keen joy. I felt glad too, without knowing why.

Her dreaminess must have infected me too. All I did was lounge about, and I too read nothing. For all my tiredness, I paced up and down the room in the evenings, hands in pockets, talking about Masha.

‘When do you think she’ll be back?’ I would ask my sister. ‘Towards Christmas, I think, no later. What can she be doing there?’

‘She hasn’t written, that means she’ll be back soon.’

‘That’s true,’ I would agree, although I knew very well that there was nothing in our town for Masha to come back to.

I missed her terribly and since I could no longer deceive myself, I tried to make others deceive me. My sister was waiting for her doctor, I was waiting for Masha, and we both talked and laughed incessantly without ever noticing that we were keeping Karpovna awake. She would lie over the stove in her room forever muttering, ‘This morning the samovar was a-humming, oh, how it was humming! That means bad luck, my dears. Bad luck!’

The only caller was the postman, who brought my sister letters from the doctor, and Prokofy, who sometimes dropped in during the evening. He would look at my sister without saying a word and then go back into the kitchen.

‘Everyone should stick to his calling,’ he would say, ‘and those what are too proud to understand will walk through a vale of tears in this life.’

He loved his ‘vale of tears’. Once, around Christmas, when I was walking through the market, he called me to his butcher’s stall and without shaking my hand declared that he had something very important to discuss. He was red in the face from frost and vodka. Next to him, at the counter, stood Nikolka of the murderous face, holding a bloody knife.

‘I want to tell you what I think,’ Prokofy began. ‘This business here can’t go on, because you yourself know this vale of tears can blacken our name. Of course, Ma’s too sorry for you to tell you anything unpleasant – I mean, that your sister should move somewhere else because she’s expecting, like. But I want no more of it, seeing as I can’t approve of the way she’s been carrying on.’

I understood and walked away from the stall. That same day my sister and I moved to Radish’s. We had no money for a cab, so we walked. I carried our things in a bundle on my back, but my sister carried nothing. She kept gasping and coughing and asking if we would be there soon.

XIX

At last a letter from Masha arrived.

My dear, kind M. (she wrote), my kind, gentle ‘guardian angel’, as our old painter calls you. Goodbye. I’m going with Father to the Exhibition in America.¹⁴ In a few days I shall see the ocean – it’s so far from Dubechnya it frightens me to think of it! It’s as distant and boundless as the sky and it’s there I long to go, to be free. I’m exultant, as happy as a lark, I’m insane – you can see what a mess this letter is. My dear Misail, give me my freedom, please hurry and snap the thread which is still binding you and me. To have met and known you was like a ray of heavenly light that brightened my existence. But becoming your wife was a mistake, you understand that, and the realization of this mistake weighs heavy on me. I go down on my knees and beg you, my dear generous friend, to send me a telegram as quick as you can, before I travel over the ocean. Tell me that you agree to correct the mistake both of us made, to take away the only stone that drags my wings down. Father will make all the arrangements and he’s promised not to trouble you too much with formalities. And so, am I as free as a bird? Yes? Be happy, God bless you. Forgive me for having sinned.

I’m alive and well. I’m throwing money away, I do many stupid things and every minute I thank God that a silly woman like me has no children. I’m having success with my singing, but it’s no idle pastime, it’s my refuge, my cell where I retire to find peace. King David had a ring with the inscription ‘All things pass’. Whenever I feel sad those words cheer me up, but when I’m cheerful they make me sad.

I have a ring now with Hebrew letters and it’s a talisman that will keep me from temptation. All things pass, and life itself will pass, which means one needs nothing. Or perhaps all one needs to know is that one is free, because free people need nothing, absolutely nothing. Break the thread. My fondest love to you and your sister.

Forgive and forget your M.

My sister was lying in one room; in another lay Radish, who had been ill again and was just convalescing. When the letter arrived my sister had quickly gone into the painter’s room, had sat down and started reading to him. Every day she read Ostrovsky¹⁵ or Gogol, and he would listen very seriously, staring into space. Now and then he would shake his head and mutter to himself ‘All things are possible, all things!’

If something ugly, nasty was depicted in a play he would poke the book with his finger and start gloating, ‘There’s a pack of lies. That’s what lying does for you!’

He liked plays for their plot, moral message and intricate artistic structure, and he always called the author him, he, never actually mentioning names. ‘How skilfully he’s made everything fit together!’ he would say.

This time my sister read only one page to him; she could not go on as her voice was too weak. Radish took her by the arm, twitched his dry lips and said in a barely audible, hoarse voice, ‘The righteous man’s soul is white and smooth as chalk, but a sinner’s is like pumice stone. A righteous man’s soul is like bright oil, but a sinner’s is like tar. We must toil, endure sorrow, suffer illness,’ he went on. ‘But he who does not toil or grieve will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Woe to the well-fed, woe to the strong, woe to the rich, woe to the usurers. They will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Aphids eat grass, rust eats iron…’

I read the letter once more. Then the soldier came into the kitchen – the same soldier who twice weekly brought us tea, French rolls and grouse that smelt of perfume. Who the sender was remained a mystery. I had no work, so I had to stay at home for days on end, and whoever sent the rolls must have known that we were hard up.

I could hear my sister talking to the soldier and cheerfully laughing. Then she ate a small roll, lay on the bed and told me, ‘From the very start, when you said you didn’t want to work in an office and became a house-painter, Anyuta Blagovo and I knew that you were in the right, but we were too scared to say it out loud. Tell me, what is this strange power that prevents us from saying what we think? Take Anyuta Blagovo, for example. She loves you, she adores you, and she knows that you’re right. She loves me like a sister and knows that I’m right as well. Perhaps in her heart of hearts she envies me. But something is stopping her from coming to see us. She avoids us, she’s scared.’

My sister folded her hands on her breast and said excitedly, ‘If only you knew how she loves you! She confessed it to me alone, and in secret, in the dark. She used to take me to a dark avenue in the garden and whisper how dear you are to her. You’ll see, she’ll never marry, because she loves you. Don’t you feel sorry for her?’

‘Yes.’

‘She was the one who sent those rolls. She really makes me laugh. Why should she hide it? I was once funny and silly too, but now I’ve left that place I’m no longer scared of anyone. I think and I say what I like out loud and that’s made me happy. When I was living at home I had no idea what happiness was; now I wouldn’t change places with a queen.’

Dr Blagovo arrived. He had received his M.D. and was staying in town at his father’s place for a little rest. He said that he would soon be off to St Petersburg again, as he wanted to do research in typhus and cholera inoculations, it seemed. He wanted to go abroad to complete his studies and then become a professor. He had resigned from the army and wore loose-fitting cheviot jackets, very wide trousers and superb ties. My sister was in raptures over the tiepins, the cufflinks, and the red silk scarf he sported in the top pocket of his jacket. Once, when we had nothing to do, we tried to remember how many suits he had and concluded that there were at least ten. He clearly loved my sister as much as before, but not once, even as a joke, did he suggest taking her with him to St Petersburg or abroad. I just couldn’t imagine what would happen to her if she survived, what would become of the child. All she did was daydream, however, without giving any serious thought to the future: she said that he could go where he liked, even abandon her, as long as he was happy, and that she was quite content with things as they had turned out.

When he visited us he usually listened very carefully to her and insisted she had drops in her milk. And this time it was the same. He listened to her chest, then made her drink a glass of milk, after which our rooms smelled of creosote.

‘That’s my clever girl!’ he said, taking her glass. ‘You mustn’t talk too much, you’ve been chattering ten to the dozen lately. Now, please don’t talk so much!’

She burst out laughing. Then he went into Radish’s room, where I was sitting, and gave me an affectionate pat on the shoulder.

‘Well, how are you, old man?’ he asked, bending over the invalid.

‘Sir,’ Radish said, quietly moving his lips. ‘If I may be so bold as to inform you, sir… all of us are in God’s hands, we all have to die some time… Allow me to tell you the truth, sir… you won’t enter the kingdom of heaven!’

‘What can I do about it?’ the doctor joked. ‘Someone has to go to hell.’

And then, suddenly, I seemed to lose consciousness and felt that I was dreaming: it was a winter’s night and I was standing in the slaughterhouse next to Prokofy, who smelt of pepper-brandy. I tried to pull myself together, rubbed my eyes and seemed to be on my way to the Governor’s, for the interview. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before or since and I can only put these strange, dream-like memories down to nervous strain. I lived through the scene at the slaughterhouse and my interview at the Governor’s, vaguely conscious all the time that it wasn’t real. When I came to, I realized that I wasn’t in the house, but standing near a street-lamp with the doctor.

‘It’s sad, so sad,’ he was saying, the tears running down his cheeks. ‘She’s cheerful, always laughing and full of hope. But her condition is hopeless, my dear friend. Your Radish hates me and keeps trying to drum into me how badly I’ve behaved towards her. In his way he’s right, but I have my views as well and I don’t regret what happened at all. One must love, we should all love, shouldn’t we? Without love there wouldn’t be any life and the man who fears love and runs away from it is not free.’

Gradually he turned to other topics – science, his thesis, which had a good reception in St Petersburg. He spoke very enthusiastically and quite forgot my sister, his own sorrows, and me. He was thrilled with life. ‘She has America and a ring with an inscription,’ I thought, ‘and he has a higher degree and an academic career in front of him. Only my sister and I are in the same old rut.’

I said goodbye and went over to a street-lamp to read the letter again. And I remembered vividly how she had come down to the mill one spring morning to see me, how she lay down and covered herself with a sheepskin coat, trying to look like a simple old peasant woman. Another time, when we were pulling the fish-trap out of the water, large raindrops scattered over us from the willows along the bank and made us laugh.

Everything was dark in our house in Great Dvoryansky Street. I climbed the fence and went into the kitchen by the back door, as in former days, to fetch a lamp. No one was there. A samovar was hissing by the stove, all ready for Father. ‘Who’s going to pour Father’s tea for him now?’ I wondered. Taking the lamp, I went into my hut, made up a bed from old newspapers and lay down. The spikes on the wall looked as ominous as before and their shadows flickered. It was cold. I expected my sister to come in with my supper at any moment, but immediately I remembered that she was ill at Radish’s. Climbing that fence and lying in my unheated hut struck me as bizarre. Everything seemed confused and my imagination conjured up the oddest things.

The bell rang. I remember those sounds from childhood: at first the wire rustling along the wall, then a short, plaintive tinkle. This was Father returning from his club. I got up and went into the kitchen. When Aksinya the cook saw me she clasped her hands and, for some reason, burst out crying.

‘My dear boy!’ she said softly. ‘My dear! Oh, good heavens!’

She was so excited she began crumpling her apron. Half-gallon jars of berries in vodka stood in the window. I poured out a teacupful and gulped it down, I was so thirsty. Aksinya had just scrubbed the table and benches and there was that smell which bright, comfortable kitchens always have where the cook keeps everything clean and shining. This smell, with the chirping of crickets, always used to tempt us into the kitchen when we were children and put us in the mood for fairy tales and card games.

‘Where’s Cleopatra?’ Aksinya asked, quietly and hurriedly, holding her breath. ‘And where’s your cap, dear? I hear your wife’s gone to St Petersburg.’

She had worked for us when Mother was alive and used to bath me and Cleopatra in a tub. And for her we were still children who had to be told what to do. Within a quarter of an hour she had revealed to me, in that quiet kitchen, with all the wisdom of an old servant, the ideas she had been accumulating since we last met. She told me that the doctor ought to be forced to marry Cleopatra – he only needed a good fright, and that, if the application were made in the right way, the bishop would dissolve his first marriage. She said that it would be a good idea to sell Dubechnya without my wife knowing anything about it and to bank the money in my own name; that if my sister and I went down on bended knees before our father and begged hard enough, he would perhaps forgive us; and that we should say a special prayer to the Holy Mother.

‘Well, off with you, dear, go and talk to him,’ she said when we heard Father coughing. ‘Go and talk to him, bow down before him, your head won’t fall off.’

So I went. Father was at his desk sketching a plan for a villa with Gothic windows and a stumpy turret that resembled the watchtower of a fire-station – all very heavy-handed and amateurish. I entered his study and stopped where I could see the plan. I didn’t know why I’d come to see Father, but when I saw his gaunt face, his red neck, his shadow on the wall, I remember that I wanted to throw my arms around his neck and go down on my bended knees as Aksinya had instructed. But the sight of that villa with its Gothic windows and stumpy turret held me back.

‘Good evening,’ I said.

He looked at me and immediately looked down at his plan.

‘What do you want?’ he asked after a while.

‘I’ve come to tell you that my sister is very ill. She doesn’t have long to live,’ I added in an empty voice.

‘Well, now,’ Father sighed, taking off his spectacles and laying them on the table. ‘As ye sow, so shall ye reap. As ye sow, so shall ye reap,’ he repeated, getting up from the table. ‘I want you to remember when you came here two years ago. In this very place I asked you, I begged you, to abandon the error of your ways. I reminded you of your duty, your honour, your debt to your ancestors, whose traditions must be held sacred. You ignored my advice and stubbornly clung to your erroneous ideas. What’s more, you led your sister astray and made her lose her moral sense and all sense of decency. Now you’re both paying for it. Well, then, as ye sow, so shall ye reap!’

He said all this pacing the study. Probably he thought that I’d come to apologize and probably plead for myself and my sister. I was cold, I shivered feverishly and spoke in a hoarse voice and with great difficulty.

‘And I would also ask you to remember something,’ I said. ‘In this very room I begged you to try and understand my viewpoint, to think hard about what we’re living for and how we should live. But your only answer was to talk about ancestors, about the grandfather who wrote poetry. Now, when you’re told that your only daughter is hopelessly ill, all you can do is go on about ancestors and tradition. How can you be so thoughtless in your old age, when death is just round the corner and you have only five or ten years left?’

‘Why have you come here?’ Father asked sternly, clearly annoyed with me for calling him thoughtless.

‘I don’t know. I love you and can’t say how sorry I am that we’re so far apart. That’s why I came. I still love you, but my sister’s finished with you for good. She won’t forgive you, she never will. The mere mention of your name fills her with revulsion for the past, for life.’

‘And who’s to blame?’ Father shouted. ‘You’re to blame, you scoundrel!’

‘All right, I’m to blame,’ I said. ‘I admit that I’m to blame for many things. But why is the type of life you’re leading – which you insist we have to follow – so boring, so undistinguished? In all the houses you’ve been building for thirty years now, why isn’t there a single person who could teach me how to live the way you want? There’s not one honest man in the whole town! These houses of yours are thieves’ kitchens, where life is made hell for mothers and daughters and where children are tortured. My poor mother!’ I went on despairingly. ‘My poor sister! One has to drug oneself with vodka, cards, scandal, one has to cringe, play the hypocrite, draw up plan after plan for years and years to blind oneself to the horrors lurking in those houses. Our town has existed for hundreds of years and not once in all that time has it given one useful person to the country – not one! Anything at all bright and lively has been stifled at birth by you. This is a town of shopkeepers, publicans, clerks, priests. It’s a useless town, no good to anyone. Not one person would be sorry if the earth suddenly swallowed it up.’

‘I don’t want to hear any more, you scoundrel!’ my father said, picking up a ruler from the table. ‘You’re drunk! How dare you visit your father in that state! I’m telling you for the last time – and you can tell this to your slut of a sister – that you will get nothing from me. There’s no place in my heart for disobedient children, and if they suffer for their disobedience and obstinacy they’ll get no pity from me. You can go back to where you came from. It was God’s will to punish me through you, but I endure this trial with all humility. I’ll find consolation in suffering and never-ending toil, as Job did. You will never cross my doorstep again unless you reform. I’m a just person, everything I’m telling you is good sense. If you want to do yourself some good, remember what I said to you before and what I’m telling you now – remember it for the rest of your life!’

I gave up and left. I don’t remember what happened that night or on the next day. People said that I staggered bare-headed through the streets, singing out loud, with crowds of boys following me and shouting ‘Better-than-Nothing! Better-than-Nothing!’

XX

If I had wanted a ring I would have chosen the following inscription for it: ‘Nothing passes’. I believe that nothing actually disappears without trace and that the slightest step we take has some meaning for the present and future.

What I have lived through has not been in vain. The people in the town have been touched by my misfortunes and my powers of endurance. No longer do they call me ‘Better-than-Nothing’, no longer do they laugh at me or pour water over me when I walk through the market. Now they are used to my being a workman and they see nothing strange in a gentleman like myself carrying buckets of paint and fitting window-panes. On the contrary, they willingly give me jobs to do and I’m considered an excellent workman and the best contractor after Radish. Although his health is better – he still paints church belfry cupolas without using scaffolding – he can no longer keep the men under control. I run around town now instead of him, looking for orders. I take men on, sack them, I borrow money at high interest. And now that I’ve become a contractor I can understand how a man can run round town for three days looking for roofers, for the sake of some lousy little job. People are polite to me, call me ‘Mr’, and in the houses where I’m working I’m given tea and asked if I want a hot meal. Children and girls often come and watch me, with sad, inquisitive looks.

One day I was working in the Governor’s garden, painting a summer house to look like marble. The Governor was out strolling and came into the summer house. Having nothing else to do he started talking to me. I reminded him how once he had ordered me to his office for an interview. He stared into my face for a while, then he made an ‘O’ with his mouth, spread his arms out helplessly and said, ‘I don’t remember!’

I have aged and become taciturn, stiff and stern, and I rarely laugh. People say that I’ve come to resemble Radish, and I bore my workmen with useless moral exhortations.

My ex-wife Mariya Dolzhikov now lives abroad, and her father, the engineer, is building a railroad in some eastern Russian province and buying up estates there. Dr Blagovo is also abroad. Dubechnya has once again passed to Mrs Cheprakov, who bought it back after getting the engineer to cut twenty per cent off the price. Moisey now goes around in a bowler hat. He often comes into town on a racing droshky and stops near the bank. They say he’s bought himself an estate on a mortgage and he’s always inquiring at the bank about Dubechnya, which he intends buying as well. For a long time poor Ivan Cheprakov roamed around the town, doing nothing and drinking heavily. I had tried to fix him up with a job with us and for a while he worked with us, painting roofs and doing some glazing. He even grew to like the work. Like any regular house-painter, he stole linseed oil, asked for tips and got drunk. But he soon grew sick and tired of it and went back to Dubechnya. Later on the lads confessed to me that he had been inciting them to help him kill Moisey at night and rob Mrs Cheprakov.